Margo Jefferson

Born in upper-crust black Chicago - her father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation's oldest black hospital, her mother was a socialite - Margo Jefferson (1947) has spent most of her life among 'the colored aristocracy'. Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at historical moments - the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of postracial America - the author charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions.

A Memoir

Negroland

Stunning for her daring originality, the author of Negroland gives us what she calls "a temperamental autobiography," comprised of visceral, intimate fragments that fuse criticism and memoir. Margo Jefferson constructs a nervous system with pieces of different lengths and tone, conjoining arts writing (poem, song, performance) with life writing (history, psychology). The book's structure is determined by signal moments of her life, those that trouble her as well as those that thrill and restore. In this nervous system: - The sounds of a black spinning disc of a 1950's jazz LP as intimate and instructive as a parent's voice. - The muscles and movements of a ballerina, spliced with those of an Olympic runner: template for what a female body could be. - Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy finds her way into the art of Kara Walker and the songs of Cécile McLorin Salvant. - Bing Crosby and Ike Turner become alter egos. - W.E.B. DuBois and George Eliot meet illicitly, as he appropriates lines from her story "The Hidden Veil" to write his famous "behind the veil" passages in The Souls of Black Folk. - The words of multiple others (writers, singers, film characters, friends, family) act as prompts and as dialogue. The fragments of this brilliant book, while not neglecting family, race, and class, are informed by a kind of aesthetic drive: longing, ecstasy, or even acute ambivalence. Constructing a nervous system is Jefferson's relentlessly galvanizing mis en scene for unconventional storytelling as well as a platform for unexpected dramatis personae.

Constructing a Nervous System

Michael Jackson was once universally acclaimed as a song-and-dance man of genius. Now his stratospheric musical career has undeniably taken a backseat to his odd behavior and his legal troubles.

On Michael Jackson

Ripping Off Black Music

Taking in the jazz and blues icons whom Jefferson idolised as a child in the 1950s, ideas of what the female body could be - as incarnated by trailblazing Black dancers and athletes - Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy reimagined in the artworks of Kara Walker, white supremacy in the novels of Willa Cather, and more, this breathtakingly eloquent account is both a critique and a vindication of the constructed self.

Constructing A Nervous System

From "one of our most nuanced thinkers on the intersections of race, class, and feminism (Cathy Park Hong, New York Times bestselling author of Minor Feelings) comes a memoir "as electric as the title suggests" (Maggie Nelson, author of On Freedom). The award-winning critic and memoirist Margo Jefferson has lived in the thrall of a cast of others—her parents and maternal grandmother, jazz luminaries, writers, artists, athletes, and stars. These are the figures who thrill and trouble her, and who have made up her sense of self as a person and as a writer. In her much-anticipated follow-up to Negroland, Jefferson brings these figures to life in a memoir of stunning originality, a performance of the elements that comprise and occupy the mind of one of our foremost critics. In Constructing a Nervous System, Jefferson shatters her self into pieces and recombines them into a new and vital apparatus on the page, fusing the criticism that she is known for, fragments of the family members she grieves for, and signal moments from her life, as well as the words of those who have peopled her past and accompanied her in her solitude, dramatized here like never before. Bing Crosby and Ike Turner are among the author’s alter egos. The sounds of a jazz LP emerge as the intimate and instructive sounds of a parent’s voice. W. E. B. Du Bois and George Eliot meet illicitly. The muscles and movements of a ballerina are spliced with those of an Olympic runner, becoming a template for what a black female body can be. The result is a wildly innovative work of depth and stirring beauty. It is defined by fractures and dissonance, longing and ecstasy, and a persistent searching. Jefferson interrogates her own self as well as the act of writing memoir, and probes the fissures at the center of American cultural life.

The renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning cultural critic brilliantly unravels the complexities of one of the most enigmatic figures of our time in this passionate, incisive, and bracing work of cultural analysis. Who is Michael Jackson and what does it mean to call him a “What Is It”? What do P. T. Barnum, Peter Pan, and Edgar Allan Poe have to do with our fascination with Jackson? How did his curious Victorian upbringing and his tenure as a child prodigy on the “chitlin’ circuit” inform his character and multiplicity of selves? How is Michael Jackson’s celebrity related to the outrageous popularity of nineteenth-century minstrelsy? What is the perverse appeal of child stars for grown-ups and what is the price of such stardom for these children and for us? What uncanniness provoked Michael Jackson to become “Alone of All His Race, Alone of All Her Sex,” while establishing himself as an undeniably great performer with neo-Gothic, dandy proclivities and a producer of visionary music videos? What do we find so unnerving about Michael Jackson’s presumed monstrosity? In short, how are we all of us implicated? In this stunning book, Margo Jefferson gives us the incontrovertible lowdown on call-him-what-you-wish; she offers a powerful reckoning with a quintessential, richly allusive signifier of American society and popular culture.

Frapujący obraz czarnych elit Ameryki. Jedna z najlepszych książek roku według „The Washington Post”, „Los Angeles Times”, „Time” i „Vanity Fair”! Margo Jefferson, pisarka, krytyczka literatury i laureatka Nagrody Pulitzera w dziedzinie krytyki, dorastała wśród „czarnej arystokracji” Chicago. Negroland to świat uprzywilejowanych Afroamerykanów, którzy w połowie XX wieku osiągnęli status dorównujący przedstawicielom białych elit. Wnikliwie analizując własne doświadczenia, uczucia i wątpliwości, Jefferson tworzy wielowarstwowy portret ludzi uwięzionych wśród społecznych konwenansów i rasistowskich uprzedzeń, starających się znaleźć swoje miejsce w społeczeństwie, w którym biała większość najchętniej odmówiłaby im jakichkolwiek praw i przywilejów. Życie Margo w latach 50. i 60. to nieustające lawirowanie: pomiędzy wymogami własnej klasy społecznej (eleganckie stroje, kulturalne zachowanie, snobistyczne zainteresowania) a kamuflowaniem swojej przynależności do elity, zarówno przed biedniejszymi przedstawicielami czarnej społeczności, jak i przed większością białych. Jefferson jest naszym narodowym skarbem, a jej wspomnienia powinny być czytane w całym kraju. – „Vanity Fair” Odważna, odkrywcza książka. Przywołuje głosy największych amerykańskich myślicieli w kwestii rasy: Jamesa Baldwina, Fredericka Douglassa, W.E.B. Du Bois. – „The New York Times Book Review” Margo Jefferson (ur. 1947 r. w Chicago) – amerykańska pisarka, dziennikarka i krytyczka literacka. Laureatka Nagrody Pulitzera w dziedzinie krytyki. Autorka On Michael Jackson, kulturowej analizy życia i twórczości króla muzyki pop. Obecnie prowadzi warsztaty kreatywnego pisania na Columbia University School of the Arts.

Margo Jefferson

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