Mental health course - Mad Blackness*: Rage, Resistance, Refusal

A discussion featuring La Marr Jurelle Bruce, Kelly Baker Josephs, Théri Pickens, and JT Roane, moderated by Kaiama L. Glover 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 (Mad Blackness::Black Madness, 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). Image credit: Tessa Mars, “A Vision of Peace, Harmony, and Good Intelligence” (2020). This event is part of The Scholar and Feminist Conference 2022 - Living in Madness: Decolonization, Creation, Healing. Learn more about this event at: https://bcrw.barnard.edu/event/mad-blackness-rage-resistance-refusal/ Learn more about the conference at: https://bcrw.barnard.edu/event/living-in-madness-decolonization-creation-healing/