Description:

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.” 

More information about the speakers is available on the event page.

Hosted by:
Barnard Center for Research on Women