Negroland - A Memoir

Zusatztext 45749156 Informationen zum Autor The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism! MARGO JEFFERSON was for years a theater 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. I’m a chronicler of Negroland, a participant-observer, an elegist, dissenter and admirer; sometime expatriate, ongoing interlocutor.   I call it Negroland because I still find “Negro” a word of wonders, glorious and terrible. A word for runaway slave posters and civil rights proclamations; for social constructs and street corner flaunts. A tonal-language word whose meaning shifts as setting and context shift, as history twists, lurches, advances, and stagnates. As capital letters appear to enhance its dignity; as other nomenclatures arise to challenge its primacy.   I call it Negroland because “Negro” dominated our history for so long; because I lived with its meanings and intimations for so long; because they were essential to my first discoveries of what race meant, or, as we now say, how race was constructed. For nearly two hundred years we in Negroland have called ourselves all manner of things. Like      the colored aristocracy      the colored elite      the colored 400      the 400      the blue vein society      the big families, the old families, the old settlers, the pioneers      Negro society, black society      the Negro, the black, the African-American upper class or elite. I was born in 1947, and my generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements received little notice or credit from white America, we were not to discuss our faults, lapses, or uncertainties in public. (Even now I shy away from the word “failings.”) Even the least of them would be turned against the race. Most white people made no room for the doctrine of “human, all too human”: our imperfections were sub- or provisionally human.   For my generation the motto was still: Achievement. Invulnerability. Comportment.   Part of me dreads revealing anything in these pages except our drive to excellence. But I dread the constricted expression that comes from that. And we’re prone to being touchy. Self-righteously smug and snobbish. So let me begin in a quiet, clinical way.   I was born into the Chicago branch of Negroland. My father was a doctor, a pediatrician, and for some years head of pediatrics at Provident, the nation’s oldest black hospital. My mother was a social worker who left her job when she married, and throughout my childhood she was a full-time wife, mother, and socialite. But where did they come from to get there? And which clubs and organizations did they join to seal their membership in this world?   A brief vita of the author.      Margo Jefferson:      Ancestors: (In chronological order): slaves and slaveholders in Virginia, Kentucky, and Mississippi; farmers, musi­cians, butlers, construction crew supervisors, teachers, beauticians and maids, seamstresses and dressmakers, engineers, policewomen, real estate businesswomen, lawyers, judges, doctors and social workers      Father’s fraternity: Kappa Alpha Psi      Mother’s (and sister’s) sorority: Delta Sigma Theta      Parents’ national clubs: the Boulé (father); the Northeast­erners (mother)     Sister’s and my national clubs: Jack and Jill; the Co-Ettes   Local clubs, schools, and camps will be named as we go along. Skin color and hair will be described, evaluated too, along with other racialized physical traits. Questions inevita­bly will arise. Among them: How does one—how do you, how do I—parse class, race, family, and temper...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Margo Jefferson
• Editore: Pantheon Schocken Books
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Copertina rigida
• Pubblicazione: 30.09.2015
• EAN: 9780307378453
• ISBN: 978-0-307-37845-3
• Dimensioni: 147 mm x 217 mm x 23 mm
• Categoria: Saggistica > Filosofia, religione > Biografie, autobiografie