Negroland: A Memoir
2015 memoir by Margo Jefferson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Negroland: A Memoir is a 2015 book by Margo Jefferson.[1][2][3][4][5] It is a memoir of growing up in 1950s and 1960s America within a small, privileged segment of black American society known as the black bourgeoisie, or African-American upper class.
First edition | |
| Author | Margo Jefferson |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Memoir |
| Published | 2015 |
| Publisher | Pantheon Books[1] |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 248[1] |
Reception
It was described by Dwight Garner in The New York Times as a "powerful and complicated memoir",[6] and by Margaret Busby in The Sunday Times as "utterly compelling",[7] while Anita Sethi wrote in The Observer: "Jefferson fascinatingly explores how her personal experience intersected with politics, from the civil rights movement to feminism, as well as history before her birth."[8] Tracy K. Smith wrote in The New York Times: "The visible narrative apparatus of 'Negroland' highlights its author's extreme vulnerability in the face of her material. It also makes apparent the all-too-often invisible fallout of our nation's ongoing obsession with race and class: Namely, that living a life as an exemplar of black excellence — and living with the survivor's guilt that often accompanies such excellence — can have a psychic effect nearly as deadening and dehumanizing as that of racial injustice itself."[9]
In 2016, Negroland was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction[10][11] and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the Autobiography category.
Awards and honors
- 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography), winner.[12]
- June 2016, chosen as a Book of the Week by BBC Radio 4.
- 2016 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize.[13]
See also
- E. Franklin Frazier's sociological Black Bourgeoisie (first edition in English in 1957 translated from the 1955 French original)
- Lawrence Otis Graham's Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class (2000)
