Negroland: A Memoir - Couverture souple

Jefferson, Margo

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1783783028 ISBN 13 : 9781783783021

Editeur : Granta Books, 2016

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

'The honesty of Negroland is matched only by its historical depth and intellectual integrity' -- Michael La Pointe, Best Books of 2016, TLS

'A candid memoir about 'race' in America that zooms into sharp focus right now and makes you question everything, even the too easy term 'race in America'. The book rings and chimes and finds strength in contradiction' -- Jackie Kay, Best Books of 2016, Herald

'Full of zingy sentences... Jefferson is as charming as she is enlightening; most readers of this fine book will hope for future volumes of recollection' -- Sukhdev Sandhu, Financial Times

'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' -- Clive Davis, The Times

'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 it, we would have been deprived of a remarkable achievement' -- Margaret Busby, Sunday Times

'As Margo Jefferson illuminates in her captivating memoir, Negroland is not so much a geographic location as a state of mind; an exclusive club without discernible borders, to which few have ever belonged... As its title suggests, this is a bold and defiant work that enumerates the credits and deficits of black life; Jefferson's reflections are leavened by a sharp wit and a literary rolling of the eyes when dissecting the nuances of prejudice... Self-pity forms no part of Jefferson's writing palette. Her memoir doesn't linger on grief: it's mostly breezy and conversational, and every so often she breaks off to address the reader conspiratorially, like the protagonist in a film speaking directly to the camera. It serves the book well, for much of Negroland has the experimental and experiential quality of jazz... Charm is this book's watchword' -- Colin Grant, Guardian

'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' -- Lucy Scholes, the i paper

'In Negroland, writes Margo Jefferson, 'we thought of ourselves as the Third Race, poised between the masses of Negroes and all classes of Caucasians.' This penetrating memoir... is at its heart an unpacking of that sentence and its implications... This book encapsulates the tension between wanting and fearing to be seen' -- Economist

' 'Negroland is a sharp-eyed cultural commentary on an era of America that has often been too simply told' -- Aminatta Forna, summer books round up, Observer

'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' --Anna Carey, Irish Times

'A previous memoir with profound political resonance, Negroland is an illuminating exploration of the racial politics of culture and class' -- Houman Barekat, Irish Times

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 a 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' -- Alastair Mabbott, Herald

'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' -- Doug Johnstone, Big Issue

'Jefferson writes with piercing clarity of a childhood which was full of love and opportunity at home, but also saturated by contradiction, confusions and a racism which corrodes, like rust, to the heart's core' -- Helen Dunmore, summer books round up, Observer

'Innovative, unsettling and powerful... Margo Jefferson brilliantly enlivens the memoir form, disrupting its comforting beat in order to be heard' -- Rona Cran, TLS

'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' -- Eleanor Franzén, Elle Thinks (blog)

'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 into 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 though and discussion about the subject - something which is ongoing and necessary. It's a 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 all exist on one level but inhabit different spheres of repression and discrimination... This is a powerful and though-provoking memoir' -- Eric Anderson, Lonesome Reader (blog)

'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 that I haven't seen before. It's a fascinating read and an insight into an underexplored area of society. Highly recommended' --Naomi Frisby, Writes of Women (blog)

'Fascinating... this is a rare insight, told with boldness, into a time where race, class and gender were being questioned by the civil rights movement and the rise of feminism. Jefferson doesn't shy away from retelling difficult encounters and experiences, including her own personal battle with depression. It's a thought-provoking read that offers a new angle on such a revolutionary period of modern history' -- Independent

'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' -- Sacha Waldron, Skinny

'[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

Extrait :

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 temperament? How many kinds of deprivation are there? What is the compass of privilege? What has made and maimed me?

Here are some of this group’s founding categories, the opposi­tions and distinctions they came to live by.

     Northerner / Southerner
     house slave / field hand
     free black / slave black
     free black / free mulatto
     skilled worker / unskilled worker (free or slave)
     owns property / owns none
     reads and writes fluently / reads a little but does not write / reads and writes a little / neither reads nor writes
     descends from African and Indian royalty / descends from African obscurities / descends from upper-class whites / descends from lower-class whites / descends from no whites at all
 
White Americans have always known how to develop aris­tocracies from local resources, however scant. British grocers arrive on the Mayflower and become founding fathers. German laborers emigrate to Chicago and become slaughterhouse kings. Women of equally modest origins marry these men or their rivals or their betters and become social arbiters.
 
We did the same. “Colored society” was originally a mélange of

     men and women who were given favorable treatment, money, property, and even freedom by well-born Cauca­sian owners, employers, and parents;
     men and women who bought their freedom with hard cash and hard labor;
     men, women, and children bought and freed by slavery-hating whites or Negro friends and relatives;
     men and women descended from free Negroes, hence born free.
 
They learned their letters and their manners; they learned skilled trades (barber, caterer, baker, jeweler, machinist, tailor, dressmaker); they were the best-trained servants in the bet­ter white homes and hotels; they bought real estate; published newspapers; established schools and churches; formed clubs and mutual aid societies; took care to marry among themselves. Some arrived from Haiti alongside whites fleeing Toussaint L’Ouverture’s black revolution: their ranks included free mulat­toes and slaves who, after some pretense of loyalty, found it easy to desert their former masters and go into the business of upward mobility. From New Orleans to New York, men and women of mixed blood insistently established their primacy.
 
I’ve fallen into a mocking tone that feels prematurely disloyal.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Granta Books
• Date d'édition: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1783783028
• ISBN 13: 9781783783021
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 256