Negroland: A memoir/ Margo Jefferson.
At once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative, celebratory and elegiac-here is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of Margo Jefferson's rarefied upbringing and education among a black elite concerned with distancing itself from whites and the black generality while tirelessly measuring itself against both.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 has spent most of her life among (call them what you will) the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society. Since the nineteenth century, they have stood apart, these inhabitants of Negroland, "a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty."Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments-the civil-rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of postracial America-Margo Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions. Aware as it is of heartwrenching despair and depression, this book is a triumphant paean to the grace of perseverance.
Record details
- ISBN: 9781504681506 (sound recording)
- Physical Description: 1 online resource (8 audio files) : digital
- Edition: Unabridged.
- Publisher: Ashland : Blackstone Audio, Inc., and Buck 50 Productions, LLC, 2015.
Content descriptions
General Note: | Unabridged. |
Participant or Performer Note: | Narrator: Robin Miles. |
System Details Note: | Requires OverDrive Listen (file size: N/A KB) or OverDrive app (file size: 225245 KB). |
Search for related items by subject
Subject: | Nonfiction. Biography & Autobiography. Multi-Cultural. Sociology. |
Genre: | Electronic books. |
Other Formats and Editions
Electronic resources
Summary:
At once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative, celebratory and elegiac-here is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of Margo Jefferson's rarefied upbringing and education among a black elite concerned with distancing itself from whites and the black generality while tirelessly measuring itself against both.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 has spent most of her life among (call them what you will) the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society. Since the nineteenth century, they have stood apart, these inhabitants of Negroland, "a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty."Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments-the civil-rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of postracial America-Margo Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions. Aware as it is of heartwrenching despair and depression, this book is a triumphant paean to the grace of perseverance.