Negrophobia: An Urban Parable (New York Review Books Classics)

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. "A provocative, raucous dark comedy about race and racism in America, now back in print after twenty-five years. Negrophobia, with its outrageous and electrifying mix of screenplay, poetry, and performance piece on paper, pushes the conventional territory of the novel to its outer, outer limits. Raunchy and rambunctious, Darius James turns words into flesh and flesh into monstrous forms. His writing is as intoxicating as the works of William Burroughs and Ishmael Reed. Under the earthshattering effects of a voodoo spell, blond teenage sex-bomb Bubbles Brazil is plunged into a startling realm of grotesque racist visions. Horrific figures populate this parallel world wherein the demagogic Uncle H. Rap Remus calls for the instant extermination of the white race by spontaneous combustion and various citizens of Harlem are found floating in a haunting underwater dreamscape. In Negrophobia worlds collapse and re-form, people explode into strange and unnatural beings from conga-drumming Muslims and ill-tempered young Negroes with numbers instead of names to Muppet-like crack-heads and a visionary extraterrestrial who never combs his hair. By the final scene, Bubbles herself has been transformed after the strangest trip a girl can have" 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, and truly hilarious and scary Negrophobia collides head-on with the hydra-headed phenomenon 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, Negrophobia begins with the blond 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, after going on a weird trip for the ages, Bubbles is strangely transformed.