Mad Blackness*: Rage, Resistance, Refusal 

Live transcription is available here.

This panel brings together scholars delving into the myriad ways that radical black creativity confronts quotidian anti-black violence and its ensuing traumas. While exploring distinct life histories, geographies and bodies of literature/performance, the scholarship of La Marr Jurelle Bruce (How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind, 2021), Kelly Baker Josephs (Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 2013), Therí Pickens (Black Madness :: Mad Blackness, 2019), and JT Roane (“Spitting Back at Law and Order: Donnetta Hill’s Rage in an Era of Vengeance,” 2021) demystifies and responds to generations of historical and contemporary criminalization of black rage, refusal, and self-possession with careful and complicated portraits of mad black personhood and art-making across the black diaspora. In conversation, we consider how to practice an ethics of defiance against a maddening logic that brands blackness as always already “crazy.” 

Title references Therí Pickens’ Mad Blackness::Black Madness (2019). 

ATTEND

Conference Detail

The 47th annual Scholar and Feminist Conference organized by BCRW is entitled “Living in Madness: Decolonization, Creation, Healing.” The conference will be virtual and sessions will take place over a period of weeks from February to April, 2022. 

This conference will explore experiences of madness, disability, survival, and refusal through the frameworks of mad studies, disability justice, and artistic practice. Scholars, artists, activists, and practitioners will interrogate structures of medicalization and institutionalization, engaging in dialogue about the entanglement of psy-disciplines with colonial and nation-building projects predicated on scientific racism, misogyny, xenophobia, transphobia, and eugenics. We ask how structural violence has both created maddening conditions and established the terms by which survivors are pathologized, criminalized and alienated.

Among the questions we want to explore are those posed by conference panelist Camille Robcis in her intellectual history of institutional psychotherapy, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (2021), specifically how movements that have attempted to decolonize and otherwise contest the practices of psychiatry can provide us with frameworks to understand our own positioning vis-à-vis “the permanence of extreme-right movements, fascisms real and ‘in our heads,’ still spreading and gaining force throughout the world.” We take inspiration as well from our Fall 2021 event with La Marr Jurelle Bruce, whose critical discourse about madness encompasses unruliness, radical creativity, and rage in the face of systems that have used the concept of Blackness as disability to foreclose the possibilities of Black freedom. Our conference dialogues will also engage calls for intersectional approaches to abolition and decarceralization address disability and madness, and the imperative to center the experiences of indigenous and Palestinian people resisting psychic oppression while living under occupation.

The impetus for this conference comes as we collectively persist while a virus has exposed structural violence and inadequacy of profit-based systems of care, and we are also confronted with increased ecological fragility. We are now understandably asking questions about the shakiness of human experience, and how to reckon with what might be called “unlivable states of mind.” War, ecological destruction, land dispossession, occupation and policing, precarious access to shelter, and confinement in a total institution are among the conditions that are maddening, and yet upheld by powerful schemas that place value on profit, property, and hierarchy over collective wellbeing.

Gathering together, we explore potential modes of healing. Like seeds we plant without knowing which will root, we pursue collectivity and creativity in order to keep living. 

About the Speakers

La Marr Jurelle Bruce (B.A. Columbia; Ph.D. Yale) is a cultural and literary critic, Black/black studies devotee, first-generation college graduate, and Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. His scholarship explores and activates black expressive cultures—spanning literature, film, music, theatre, religion, and especially the art and aesthetics of quotidian black life. Winner of the Joe Weixlmann Essay Prize from African American Review, he has also published in American Quarterly, The Black Scholar, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Social Text, and TDR. His debut book, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity, was supported by Ford and Mellon fellowships and earned the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award. Now he is in the thick of a project on—and experiment in—convergences of love and madness. He sometimes calls it The Afromantic.

Kelly Baker Josephs is Professor of English at York College, City University of New York, and Professor of English and digital humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Insanity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2013) and coeditor of The Digital Black Atlantic (University of Minnesota Press, 2021).

Therí Pickens is Professor of English at Bates College, focusing on Arab American, African American literatures and cultures, disability, philosophy, and literary theory. Her books include New Body Politics: Narrating Arab and Black Identity in the Contemporary United States (Routledge, 2014) and Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Duke University Press, 2019), and the edited collection Arab American Aesthetics: LIterature, Material Culture, Film, and Theatre (Routledge 2018). Her critical writing has appeared in Hypatia, MELUS, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, Al-Jadid, Women and Performance, and The Journal of Ethnic American Literature, as well as the ground-breaking anthology, Blackness and Disability: Critical Examinations and Cultural Interventions and Defying the GLobal Language: Perspectives in Ethnic Studies. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming from Omnium Gatherum Quarterly, Diode, The Journal, Wordgathering, Squ** Valley Journal, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, Save the Date, and Disability Studies Quarterly. Her original drama writing has been performed at the NJ State theater. 

J.T. Roane is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. He received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and he is a 2008 graduate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. He currently serves as the lead of the Black Ecologies Initiative at ASU’s Institute for Humanities Research. He is the former co-senior editor of Black Perspectives, the digital platform of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). Roane’s scholarly essays have appeared in Souls Journal, The Review of Black Political Economy, Current Research in Digital History, and Signs. His work has also appeared in venues such as Washington Post, The Brooklyn Rail, Pacific Standard, and The Immanent Frame.

Accessibility

Live transcription and ASL interpretation will be provided. Please email any additional access needs to skreitzb@barnard.edu.

This event is free and open to all.

Streaming information will be provided closer to the dates of the events.

Image Detail

Tessa Mars, “A Vision of Peace, Harmony, and Good Intelligence” (2020)