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Budapest W8: Performing Arts - The people inside my head, too

La Marr Jurelle Bruce, “‘The People Inside My Head, Too’: Madness, Black Womanhood, and the Radical Performance of Lauryn Hill,” African American Review 45 (3), 2012

"to embrace madness is risky business for a black woman musician operating within those racist/sexist milieus, where black womanhood is double-crossed by myths of female hysteria and myths of black savagery and subrationality." p.371

 "On the one hand, "madness" is both a floating and wildly flitting signifier. On the other, the phenomenon of madness entails lived experiences that demand critical, ethical attention." p.372

 "phenomenal madness-, a severe unwieldiness or chaos of mind—producing fundamental crises of perception, emotion, meaning, and self hood—as experienced in the consciousness of the "mad" subject." p.372

 "clinical madness-, an informal shorthand for any range of psychotic, psychopathic, or severely
neurotic disorders (as diagnosed or misdiagnosed by clinicians) that may or may not coincide with phenomenal madness." p.372

 "anger, an affective state of intense and aggressive displeasure (which is surely phenomenal, but is here set apart for its analytic specificity)." p.372

 "psychosocial alterity-. radical divergence from the "normal" within a given psychosocial context." p.372

 The black woman in pain: "This process coarsens audiences to the lived reality of such pain, romanticizes and aestheticizes that pain, invites audiences' narcissistic projections onto it, and fetishizes it for voyeuristic consumption." p.373

 "the figures of the mad genius and tormented artist are stock characters in the dramas of modernity and postmodernity. Significantly, the intersection of madness and art is especially charged when inhabited by African-descended subjects." p.373

 By saying that she is speaking to the people in her head, Hill "summons clinical madness to cast herself as psychosocial other... she reminds audience members that they are not privy to her psychic and epistemic interior and that they cannot facily presume her performance to be exclusively for their consumption; there are other constituencies who warrant her attention." p.375

 Hill's song I gotta find peace of mind is a scene of "radical revelation" - she "reveals her hurt to her audience and discovers "peace of mind" for herself." It is "the site of an emotional breakdown that is also a spiritual breakthrough, and a breakout from those "boxes."" p.377

 "Hill bares her battle wounds and scars in order to communicate the trauma of abuse and the
importance of self-esteem and self-love." p.378

 "She speaks with the authority of a woman who has careened along the edge of destruction, and survived to tell her cautionary tale. What results is an exquisite depiction of black feminine
pathos and an articulation of black feminist ethos." p.378

 Hill's later performances are of a woman who is reviewed as losing her voice and losing her mind, however "For her part, Hill would likely claim that despite all she is losing, she is gaining liberation: losing the whole world to gain back her soul." p.381

 "Comprehensibility is not a fundamental condition of performances with impact; audience members needn't wholly understand what transpires before them to be deeply affected by it" p.381

 In 2012, Hill released the song Black Rage, based on the melody of My Favorite Things, "If the original song is a confection of lily-white, syrupy-sweet dreams, Hill suggests that the labor of enslaved and abjected black bodies has cut the cane to provide such sweetness." p.383

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