Black Madness Masquerade in a Nineteenth-Century American Asylum

At a crossroads where Black madness meets white sanism, Black bodyminds perish. What happens, then, at a juncture where white madness meets Blackness? This essay explores this intimate point of contact, focusing on the New York State Lunatic Asylum’s institutional journal, The Opal (1851-1860), and blackface minstrel shows produced by an inmate performance group named Blackbird Minstrels. It examines the tension and dissonance that permeate these cultural productions by white women inmates who appropriated Blackness – in forms of Black ventriloquy and blackface minstrelsy – to create safe spaces for liberating self-expressions. Through racial transgressions, gender negotiations, and madness masquerade, the white women inmates at Utica could work through their hidden thoughts, forbidden feelings, and dangerous desires at the cost of Blackness. Though liberatory, the inmates’ work ultimately reinforced the mutually destructive notion of race and madness, the cultural imagination of which still haunts twenty-first century America where Black mad/mad Black bodyminds are demonized, policed, and obliterated according to the dictates of whiteness. Informed by Mad Studies, Black Disability Studies, and Black Feminism, this essay carries out a historical memory work to shed light on today’s mad lives at the intersections of race, gender, and madness. It grapples with what Toni Morrison calls “the choked representation of an Africanist presence” in white women inmates’ mad narratives. In an attempt to undo the violence of appropriation, the essay uses the white narratives to foreground mad Black/Black mad peoples’ lived realities.