Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2016 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award: this is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, class and American culture by a Pulitzer-prize winning critic
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.
The masterful Negroland - endlessly impressive and important - is a
book of then versus now. Slavery, the Civil War, Civil Rights, the
Black Power movement: Jefferson elegantly traverses a rich, often
troubling, but surprising historical landscape [...] There's no
navel-gazing here. The personal is no longer indistinguishable from
the political, but Jefferson achieves that volatile alchemy that's
integral to all the finest of memoirs: the transformation of an
individual story into something that resonates outside the confines
of subjective experience.
*Independent*
A rare insight into upper-class black society in the US...
Jefferson's eye for details yields some devastatingly honest and
painful insights [and she takes delight] in the subtleties of
language, in the choice of the mot juste... Jefferson is striking a
path into dangerous, unfamiliar territory
*The Times*
In this compelling, moving and clear-eyed memoir, Jefferson draws
on her own experiences and those of previous generations of
privileged black Americans to explore complex issues of identity
and privilege with insight, compassion and wry wit
*Irish Times*
Captivating... Much of Negroland has the experimental and
experiential quality of jazz... Charm is this book's watchword
*Guardian*
It would be too easy to call Negroland a ground breaking work and
yet this is exactly what it is. In her descriptions of a life lived
on the nexus of race and class Margo Jefferson tells a tale of how
people create, defy and survive systems of exclusion and inclusion,
of the human toll that must be exacted. Negroland is a work
singular in word, form and theme. Compelling and essential
reading
*The Hired Man*
Negroland is the record of a powerful mind grappling with all the
trouble of being awake. Jefferson's sensibility is both blunt and
fine-honed, austere and companionable. A dazzling book
*On Immunity*
Negroland is a subtle and subversive remembering of elite black
life before the age of Civil Rights, a magnificent use of the
memoir form, a reminder of insecurities and comfort, where KKK
stood both for Ku Klux Klan and three kinds of Kongolene
hair-straightening products
*Alexandria: the Last Nights of Cleopatra*
A marvellous, complex, stimulating and thought-provoking personal
history
*Geoff Dyer*
Jefferson's memoir pushes against the boundaries of its own
genre... Her candor, and the courage and rigor of her critic's
mind, recall a number of America's greatest thinkers on race...
what we gain from [Negroland] is revelatory
*New York Times*
Powerful... Margo Jefferson identifies and deftly explores the
tensions that come with being party of America's black elite
*O, The Oprah Magazine*
Jefferson is a national treasure and her memoir should be required
reading
*Vanity Fair*
Treads briskly and fearlessly across the treacherous terrain of
race, class, gender and entitlement ... [Jefferson] is a poetic and
bracing memoirist... Lean, specific and personal...
enlightening
*Washington Post*
Powerful and complicated... There's sinew and grace in the way she
plays with memory, dodging here and burning there, like a
photographer in a darkroom... Ms. Jefferson will not be denied...
With luck, there will be a sequel to this book
*New York Times*
Margo Jefferson sees everything and expresses it with surgical
clarity. She is the Toqueville of race in America. This is a great
book, destined to be read for a century
*Edmund White*
A masterpiece ... Jefferson has lived and worked like the great
reporter she is, traversing a little-known or -understood landscape
peopled by blacks and whites, dreamers and naysayers, the
privileged and the strivers who make up the mosaic known as
America
*Hilton Als*
Poignant... In Negroland, Jefferson is simultaneously looking in
and looking out at her blackness, elusive in her terse, evocative
reconnaissance, leaving us yearning to know more
*Los Angeles Times*
[A] meditation on race, sex, class and American culture, told
through the prism of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's memoir of
her rarefied upbringing and education as the daughter of a
successful paediatrician
*Bookseller*
A cunningly unexpected addition to the many recent books about race
relation... [Jefferson] knows who she is, now, not who someone else
wants her to be
*Elle Thinks*
It's interesting and sympathetic how Jefferson acknowledges
throughout her memoir the complexity of identity. it's also
touching how unwilling she is to give in to self pity and maintain
a tough critical distance from the deep emotional hurt she
experienced while still making the reader achingly aware of the
power of her feelings... Jefferson means to provoke thought and
discussion about the subject - something which is ongoing and
necessary. It's tremendous strength of this book that it doesn't
lapse into didacticism, but instead prompted me to feel more
awareness of how people might or might not change their behaviour
based on racial differences. It made me think about how
marginalized groups in our society don't exist on one level but
inhabit different spheres of repression and discrimination... This
is a powerful and thought-provoking memoir.
*Lonesome Reader*
Negroland is a superb book. Non-fiction books that meld genres seem
to be having a bit of a moment but what this one does differently
is consider the intersections of race, class and gender in a way I
haven't seen before. It's a fascinating read and an insight into an
underexplored area of society. Highly recommended.
*Writes of Women*
Unable to disentangle the political from the personal, Jefferson
has combined social history with autobiography in this remarkable
book. She opens a window on a section of American society that's
little-known on this side of the Atlantic... A New York Times and
Newsweek critic of many years' standing, she's written an
examination of her life and times that's revelatory and keenly
self-aware.
*Herald*
An exploration of a mesh of complex cultural identities, a tangle
of class, race, gender and appearance... Nuanced emotion and
unforgiving observation, combined with stylistic risk-taking, might
not guarantee comfortable reading, but they make Negroland utterly
compelling. Jefferson's is a reluctant memoir, but had she not
written in, we would have been deprived of a remarkable
achievement.
*Sunday Times*
Jefferson combines her own memories with elements of the broader
academic history of black communities in America, slavery and
societal structures... It is an important and deeply interesting
text on a little known slice of history.
*Skinny*
A fascinating account of the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic's
upbringing among Chicago's black elite community. It's an
intriguing look at the way race and class interplay in the United
States... It's sharp, thoughtful stuff, unafraid and honest, making
Negroland an important as well as engrossing read.
*Big Issue*
Negroland is a sharp-eyed cultural commentary on an era of America
that has often been too simply told.
*Guardian*
Jefferson writes with piercing clarity of a childhood which was
full of love and opportunity at home, but also saturated by
contradictions, confusions and a racism which corrodes, like rust,
to the heart's core.
*Observer*
[An] extraordinary book dissecting [...] race, class and gender at
a pivotal moment in American history. But to call it a memoir is to
sell it short: Jefferson constantly chafes at the edges of the
form, refusing to play by the rules in a way that gently but
absolutely prohibits complacency on the reader's part. Shortlisted
for the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize, this is a slim book, but one
that makes a deep and lasting impression
*Lady*
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