Jarring, outrageous images hurtle from nearly every page of this postmodern vivisection of the contemporary African American condition. From the subconscious of Bubbles Brazil, a white teenager smoking a joint in her bathtub, issues a dizzying onslaught of stereotypes, a surreal microcosm of American racism. Using the form of a screenplay, James evokes such characters as zombies, witch doctors, licorice men, disembodied organs, and iron lawn-jockeys, all in a frenzy of blood, filth, drugs and excrement. A huge cast of cultural icons also appears--from Rosa Parks to the Jackson Five, from Jimmy ``JJ'' Walker to Joe Louis, from Malcolm X to Aunt Jemima to Martin Luther King Jr. (``with bloodstained bullet holes in his shirt''). In a gag that typifies James's maniacal irony, the cryogenically mummified corpse of Walt Disney transforms King's famous ``I Have a Dream'' speech into a celebration of genocide. There is imagination and wicked humor in all of this, as well as some piercing insight. But the flow of images is so wild and relentless that it becomes numbing, and its impact is lost. The eschewal of traditional narrative makes the book so filmic that tired readers may deem it unsuited for the page, wishing instead for what would be a spectacular--if technically onerous--movie. (July)
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
``Sex-bomb blonde'' Bubbles Brazil thinks, ``You can never be too cool! '' For Bubbles, being cool in an almost all-black school means tough posturing to conceal her constant fear: negrophobia. In this wild, nonstop phantasmagoria, she meets weird bogeymen like the Flaming Tar Babies, Flapjack Ninja Queens, Uncle H. Rap Remus, the Zombie Master, evil Buppets, Talking Dreads, and Fred Farrakhan MacMurray, the Flubberized Nubian. Negrophobia 's fantastic satire nicely counterpoints the gritty realism of Jess Mowry's Way Past Cool ( LJ 4/1/92), though both books deal with the fear behind racism. In style, theme, and tone, the work of Montreal-based performance artist James is somewhat reminiscent of Ishmael Reed or Amiri Baraka, but his dialog is snappier. The vibrant prose makes for lively reading. Highly recommended.-- Jim Dwyer, California State Univ. at Chico
Every racial stereotype about black people comes to boisterous, blistering life in this outrageous first novel—a grand guignol comic book that draws from both racist kitsch and Afro- American high culture. Written in the form of a screenplay, it's a self-described "Rocky Horror Negro Show," a pop-schlock phantasmagoria that owes as much to William Burroughs as it does to S. Clay Wilson. Totally in-your-face, this sexually explicit, postmodern Amos and Andy show follows the strange adventures of Bubbles Brazil, a "drug-addled" blond bombshell who thinks of herself as "the reigning queen supreme of the cover-girl wet dream." She's a rich kid who hates going to school with "jigaboos" since they've turned the high-school hallways into a Mad Max spectacle of sex, drugs, and violence. This punk Orphan Annie soon finds herself transported into a nightmare dreamscape, taken there through the voodoo of a demonic Aunt Jemima called "the Maid." Along the way, she meets the "cosmic Sambo," a Negro cyborg; the Licorice Men, a group of cartoon savages with grass skirts and bones through their noses; Uncle H. Rap Remus, with his laughable accent; Malcolm X playing Bojangles; and crack kids with Walter Keene eyes. This Alice in Negroland witnesses the revenge of the lawn jockeys against their white suburban owners; and sits through a strange film-within-the-film, a Disney version of Triumph of the Will, with Walt declared president for life. Meanwhile, African cannibals dream of America and endless welfare checks. And of course, all the men are super-humanly endowed. As if that weren't enough, James riffs through lots of gross-out stuff: snot, afterbirths, pus, intestines, and the like. Thereare patches of hilarious doggerel, and bursts of iconographic high jinks. James's raucous debut is by far the best novel to emerge from New York's Lower East Side literary scene.
"In this social-media era, when we are more intent than ever on isolating things that offend and outrage, Negrophobia revels in its own outrageousness, and thus is more of a tonic now than it was almost three decades ago. It neither blinks nor recoils at the stereotypes, insults, and presumptions that have been used to cage and subdue African American self-esteem, but compels its readers to confront rather than retreat from or smooth over the retro Jim Crow imagery….American literature has seen the ascent of talented young black writers who aren’t willing to settle for parochial or hidebound conceptions of who they are and what they should say…and it’s a fine time to be reminded that crazy, willful acts of hoodoo storytelling such as Negrophobia helped make this renaissance possible." —Gene Seymour, Bookforum Negrophobia is American arcana of the highest order. And like all truly cool books, destined to forever be ahead of its time.” —Paul Beatty Negrophobia is the black version of American Psycho.” —Dany Laferrière, Los Angeles Times Negrophobia when I was still in grad school. . . . It was one of those good but rare occasions when I thought there might be one other person in the world that would get what I was doing.” —Kara Walker, DB Artmag 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 Publishers Weekly 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 Library Journal "A pop-schlock phantasmagoria that owes as much to William Burroughs as it does to S. Clay Wilson. James’s raucous debut is by far the best novel to emerge from New York’s Lower East Side literary scene." —Kirkus Negrophobia is a funky, raunchy, angry, hilarious nightmare vision of black culture. A ferocious send-up of African-American stereotypes and white racism. Darius James bursts into literature with a wild, surrealistic imagination." —Catherine Texier
