Stanford Humanities Center
La Marr Jurelle Bruce is a philosopher, fever dreamer, interdisciplinary humanities scholar, and Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Much of his scholarship explores and activates B/black, queer, and mad expressive cultures—spanning literature, music, film, theatre, and the art and aesthetics of everyday life. His debut book, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity, earned the Modern Language Association’s 2022 First Book Prize.
SHC Project
The Afromantic: Black Love Out Yonder
The Afromantic: Black Love Out Yonder will unfurl a cultural history, critical theory, aesthetic expression, and existential assertion of B/black love outside. At the center of this project is Afromance: a way of life driven by utopian dreaming, ecstatic feeling, starry-eyed seeing, deep tenderness, a passion for liberation, and a will to love—all while it tends to the great grief and strife that beset blackness. Afromance might also name our ethical commitments, artforms, critical theories, and political praxes when they are mobilized for loving blackness. The book will follow black love to cookouts, festivals, carnivals, rooftops, rallies, jazz funerals, gardens, distant stars, and forest clearings, revealing how it is portrayed and practiced in myriad cultural forms. Suffused with performative writing—writing that does what it describes—The Afromantic will be both an account of love and an act of love.
How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (Duke University Press, 2021)
