Negroland: A Memoir

Author: Margo Jefferson

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $29.99 AUD
  • : 9781783783021
  • : Granta Books
  • : Granta Books
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  • : 0.266
  • : June 2016
  • : 216mm X 135mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : 29.99
  • : June 2016
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : Margo Jefferson
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  • : Paperback
  • : 1607
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  • :
  • : 305.896073077311
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  • :
  • : 256
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Barcode 9781783783021
9781783783021

Description

At once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative, celebratory and elegiac-here is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of Margo Jefferson's rarefied upbringing and education among a black elite concerned with distancing itself from whites and the black generality while tirelessly measuring itself against both.
Born in upper-crust black Chicago-her father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation's oldest black hospital; her mother was a socialite-Margo Jefferson has spent most of her life among (call them what you will) the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society. Since the nineteenth century, they have stood apart, these inhabitants of Negroland, "a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty."
Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments-the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of postracial America-Margo Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions. Aware as it is of heartwrenching despair and depression, this book is a triumphant paean to the grace of perseverance.

Promotion info

A deeply felt meditation on race, sex, class and American culture told through the prism of Pulitzer-prize winning author Margo Jefferson's rarefied upbringing and education among Chicago's black elite

Author description

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, MARGO JEFFERSON was for years a theatre and book critic for Newsweek and The New York Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, Vogue, New York magazine, and The New Republic. She is the author of On Michael Jackson and is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.