ON THE LIMITS OF "PLAYING CRAZY": MADNESS AND MOTHERHOOD IN TONI MORRISON'S BELOVED

This essay contributes to scholarship on twentiethcentury African American literature which thematizes Black women's madness. In interrogating antebellum Black madness as at once threatening and emancipatory, I undermine marginalization of the "mad Black woman" and the associated occlusions she represents, necessarily expanding the interpretive frameworks by which we most commonly account for Black women's political consciousness. One such mode of consciousness-"playing crazy"-entails abevy of activities and behaviors discharged by historically disempowered groups to alter, even if temporarily, existing terms of intra-racial and interracial belonging. Analyzing Toni Morrison's neo-slave narrative Beloved (1988) as a site of departure from representations of "playing crazy" in contemporary African American vernacular traditions, drama, short and long fiction, I draw attention to contexts and consequences of gendered performances of "affliction." In Morrison's hands, the persona of the "mad Black woman" contributes to a unique legacy of Black struggle and Black being.