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  • Published: 19 February 2019
  • ISBN: 9781681373294
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $35.00

Negrophobia

An Urban Parable




A provocative, raucous dark comedy about race and racism in America, now back in print after twenty-five years.

A provocative, raucous dark comedy about race and racism in America, now back in print after twenty-five years and with a new preface by the author.

Darius James’s scabrous, unapologetically raunchy, truly hilarious, and deeply scary Negrophobia is a wild-eyed reckoning with the mutating insanity of American racism. A screenplay for the mind, a performance on the page, a work of poetry, a mad mix of genres and styles, a novel in the tradition of William S. Burroughs and Ishmael Reed that is like no other novel, Negrophobia begins with the blonde bombshell Bubbles Brazil succumbing to a voodoo spell and entering the inner darkness of her own shiny being. Here crackheads parade in the guise of Muppets, Muslims beat conga drums, Negroes have numbers for names, and H. Rap Remus demands the total and instantaneous extermination of the white race through spontaneous combustion. By the end of it all, after going on a weird trip for the ages, Bubbles herself is strangely transformed.

  • Published: 19 February 2019
  • ISBN: 9781681373294
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $35.00

Praise for Negrophobia

"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

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