A provocative, raucous dark comedy about race and racism in America, now back in print after twenty-five years.
Darius James is a writer and performance artist. He is the author of That's Blaxploitation, Voodoo Stew, and Froggie Chocolate's Christmas Eve and his writings have appeared in multiple publications, including the Village Voice and Spin. He also co-wrote and appeared in the 2013 film The United States of Hoodoo. He lives in Connecticut.
"In this social-media era, when we are more intent than ever on
isolating things that offend and
outrage, Negrophobia revels in its own outrageousness,
and thus is more of a tonic now than it was almost three decades
ago. It neither blinks nor recoils at the stereotypes, insults, and
presumptions that have been used to cage and subdue African
American self-esteem, but compels its readers to confront rather
than retreat from or smooth over the retro Jim Crow
imagery….American literature has seen the ascent of talented young
black writers who aren’t willing to settle for parochial or
hidebound conceptions of who they are and what they should say…and
it’s a fine time to be reminded that crazy, willful acts of hoodoo
storytelling such as Negrophobia helped make this
renaissance possible." —Gene Seymour, Bookforum
“Luridly funny and unsparingly smart, Negrophobia is American
arcana of the highest order. And like all truly cool books,
destined to forever be ahead of its time.” —Paul Beatty
“Darius James is a great writer.” —Kathy Acker
“I opened James’s book only to topple into hell. In fact,
Negrophobia is the black version of American Psycho.” —Dany
Laferrière, Los Angeles Times
“I read Negrophobia when I was still in grad school. . . . It was
one of those good but rare occasions when I thought there might be
one other person in the world that would get what I was doing.”
—Kara Walker, DB Artmag
"Comic, manic, and amazing, [Negrophobia] tells more about American
race relations than all of the walking dead suburban experts,
academics, and think tank whores who tell their fellow suburbanites
about how it feels to be black." —Ishmael Reed
"Jarring, outrageous images hurtle from nearly every page of this
postmodern vivisection of the contemporary African American
condition.... There is imagination and wicked humor in all of this,
as well as some piercing insight." —Publishers Weekly
"This is a novel of exposure, not solution. Those willing to take
the ride will find language and imagery that provide an
understanding of everything offensive and American. To see Bubbles
dragged through the mire of racial and sexual taboos is to
experience the reclamation of the icons and stereotypes that are
the signposts of relations among Americans. It’s not an altogether
pleasant experience. No one who reads Negrophobia is playing in the
dark -- just lost in it. The novel, however, is no more unpleasant
an experience than, say, having a police baton swung at your body,
or having a steel-tipped boot kick you a few hundred times after
you’ve been dragged out of your tractor-trailer. With its feet
firmly planted in the satiric tradition of Voltaire Ishmael Reed,
John Kennedy Toole, and Okot p’Bitek, James’s book is both timely
and necessary." —Christian Haye, The Village Voice
"Wild, non-stop phantasmagoria...In style, theme, and tone, the
work of performance artist James is somewhat reminiscent of Ishmael
Reed or Amiri Baraka, but his dialog is snappier. The vibrant prose
makes for lively reading. Highly recommended." —Library Journal
"A pop-schlock phantasmagoria that owes as much to William
Burroughs as it does to S. Clay Wilson. James’s raucous debut is by
far the best novel to emerge from New York’s Lower East Side
literary scene." —Kirkus
"Darius James is one of the funniest writers in America, and one of
the most serious. His subject is the big one: slavery; his
questions are the big ones: who is slave to what?" —George Trow
"Comic strip, sci-fi flick, vaudeville, black-faced minstrel show,
and lyrical poem all rolled into one. Negrophobia is a funky,
raunchy, angry, hilarious nightmare vision of black culture. A
ferocious send-up of African-American stereotypes and white racism.
Darius James bursts into literature with a wild, surrealistic
imagination." —Catherine Texier
"Darius James is a dazzling scenarist, a wanton imagist and a
nubile perpetrator of the great felony on new literature. This is a
writer of blazing intensity. Forever may he wave." —Joel Rose
"This book is not a novel but a curse which will explode in your
mind and cause your bottom to drop out. Of all the neo-hoodoo
cosmogonic jesters, Darius James proves himself to be the most
promising." —Steve Cannon
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