Chapter 1, “Mad Is a Place,” serves as the book’s introduction. It opens by staging a phantasmagoric encounter between a slave ship and a ship of fools. From this imagined scenario, the chapter unfurls a broad survey of various collisions and convergences of “blackness” and “madness” in Western modernity from the sixteenth century through the current era. Presenting an original theory and methodology of madness, the chapter goes on to survey how black radical cultural producers since the nineteenth century have mobilized “madness” for radical artmaking, self-making and worldmaking. The author cites scholarship in black cultural studies, disability studies, psychoanalysis, black feminist critique, radical psychiatry, historiography, and mad studies, situating his own intervention at the convergences of these fields. The chapter culminates with a brief synopsis of the chapters that follow.