----
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Seeing as how 'Downtown (New York) Writing' has recently been celebrated and studied in big, fat books by Brandon Stosuy and Marvin Taylor, I thought I'd draw attention to one of the most extraordinary and undervalued novels to come out of that scene. At the time Negrophobia was published in 1992, Darius James was best known for his controversial 'Ask Dr. Snakeskin' column in Penthouse magazine as well as for some stories he'd published in the East Village lit. zines like Between C&D, et. al. His ferocious, wacky fiction, whose acknowledged precedents include the great early novels of Ishmael Reed (Mumbo Jumbo,The Freelance Pallbearers), as well as much that is non-literary -- Ralph Bashki's long banned animation feature 'Coonskin,' free jazz, Richard Pryor -- was well known to local friends and colleagues like Kathy Acker, Lynne Tillman, Patrick McGrath, Gary Indiana, and others, including myself. I think we all just assumed that when Negrophobia carried his work beyond Manhattan, Darius was going to be a star, an avant-garde superhero writer a la Burroughs and Acker. But his raucous style and subversive mode of confronting racist attitudes by embracing racist stereotypes were frequently misunderstood at the time, and his work was even denounced as racist itself by certain prominent Black activists. Despite the hubbub and some great reviews, the novel was not a big success. It accrued the requisite cult following then went gradually out of print. Darius didn't help his own cause by being one of the least prolific fiction writers imaginable. He has yet to publish another book of fiction, and his only subsequent book was an uneven but occasionally stunning nonfiction book about the history of blaxploitation films which is noted below. Still, Darius may be a slowpoke, but he's one of he most gifted contemporary American fiction writers in my opinion, and Negrophobia is a singular mindblower of a novel that I think you should do yourself the favor of reading.
_________
Description
![]()
'Negrophobia (St. Martins Press, 1992) is written in the form of a screenplay, but no movie version of it exists so far. (There had been discussions about an animated movie version, and a live theatrical production has been long in the works.) The novel becomes a big screen on which Darius James projects reality and fiction, consciousness and sub-consciousness, dreams and fears of not just an American, but a whole western society where racism is in people's conscience. The book is actually a journey inside this racism.
----'All the characters in this book are cartoon–like. James has created a pyramid of racist stereotypes with supernatural powers. Negrophobia describes the strange and hallucinating adventures of a white, drug-addled teenage girl called Bubbles Brazil, and she has all the typical racial stereotypes of African-American people in her head. She lives in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, is a rich girl who hates going to school with "jigaboos" since they’ve turned the high school hallways into a mad spectacle of sex, drugs and violence.
----'Bubbles finds herself transported into a nightmare dreamscape, and she is taken there through the voodoo of a demonic Aunt Jemima called "the Maid". This Voodoo spell throws Bubbles in a parallel world of grotesque visions of racism. She now experiences racism on her own, and suddenly every racial stereotype about black people comes to life.
----'Along the way she meets "a Negro cyborg", Uncle H. Rap Remus (who rapes little children), Malcolm X, she gets beaten up by a group of Ninja-Queens in her schools bathroom, meets a bunch of cartoon savages with grass skirts, who dream of social welfare, crackhead homeboys fantasizing about Spike Lee, a zombie Elvis, and Walt Disney, who wants to take over America and establish a Gestapo state.'-- from the Negrophobia website
___________
Short excerpt:
![]()
Bubbles (v.o.):
My high school was overridden with niggas. Not the slow-witted, slow-shufflin’, eyeball-rollin’ flapjack- flippin’ niggas in the brownstone off Central Park West. Or the upwardly mobile, paper-bag-colored Klingon niggas – the nightmarish kind!
Mindless angel-dusted darkies slobbering insane single syllables, flicking switchblades and flashing straightrazor. Hip-Hoppity jungle bunnies in bright colored clothes, carrying large, loud radios we white wits call "Spadios", who drank bubbling purple carbonates and ate fried pork rinds and bag after bag of dehydrated potato slices caked with orange dust. Crotch-clawin’ niggas who talked Deputy Dawg and shot dope. Saucer-lipped ragoons who called me the "Ozark Mountyin She-Devil" and asked to feel my lunch money. Percussive porch monkeys who fart with their faces to a heavy-metal beat.
These were the kind of niggas my daddy warned me about. The kind of niggas my daddy said would whisk me off to the Isle of Unrestrained Negros far, far away, and turn me into a coalblack pickaninny with a nappy ribbon top and white button eyes if I wasn’t a good girl and didn’t do as daddy said.
______
Quotes: *
![]()
"I wanted to set up a situation where a reader had to confront his own racist thinking. And I wanted to talk about this in the book: that this culture – that popular culture – is predicted on the fact that it finds black people funny."-- Darius James
" ...these cartoons in and of themselves aren’t intended to perpetuate racism. Rather, they were designed to subvert it(...) One of the ideas for me was that the reader himself, who might have a racist thought after reading Negrophobia, would become ill and throw up. But magically, I would like the reader to step back and look at the absurdity of these images and laugh: laugh at the images, laugh at their own racism and not feel cowed by it. And also, black people should laugh at these images and realize that these images are not reflection of black people but rather a reflection of some diseased mind, which is a real distinction. Because some people – and not a lot of them – became critical of the book because they confuse what I’m writing about with actual lives of black people. My book has nothing to do with the real live of black people. It has to do with mapping out the terrain of a racist psychology and making fun of that."-- Darius James
* Quotes taken from an interview with DJ by Cups Magazine. Read the entirety here.
_____
Buy it:
![]()
Order copies of the hardcover edition for as little as $1.14 here.
Order copies of the paperback edition for as little as $5.15 here.
_____________________
The Negrophobia art show:
![]()
In 2001, Darius James collaborated with the artist Mark Brandenburg to create an art exhibition version of Negrophobia. It was held at Laura Mars Grp. in Berlin, and you can read about it here.
__________________________________
Short fiction: 'Welcome to Sambo’s World'
![]()
The Talking Dreads’ white-gloved hands bookend the words:
The walls of the image-chamber spin with lights and color, projecting a holographic mirage of a small rural town in mid-air suspension. Circled by a nimbus of phosphorescent murk, the ' disembodied head speaks in a smug, no-nonsense voice.
Dawn. As the sun rises over the small Midwestern town of “Garvey’s Corner,” a wizened Black Man in blue-denim overalls pushes a junk cart strung with clanging pots and pans. He drums his wares with two metal spoons, calling out in bluesy sing-song.
Read the rest here.
__________________________________________
Darius James on the death of Michael O'Donoghue:
![]()
----"One of the great disservices of western civilization that does us no favors at all," Michael O'Donoghue told me one Sunday afternoon as he sat curled on the sofa in the chandeliered living room of his Chelsea condo, sipping smoke from the gold-tipped filter of a Sobraine Black Russian cigarette, "is that mask you see in theater--the two Greek masks, comedy and tragedy--as if there was any fuckin' difference between one and the other!
----"Things can be both funny and not-funny at the same time. You don't need to separate between the two. They're both basically the same thing."
----As dawn broke on the morning of October 7, 1994, Michael O'Donoghue, two-time Emmy Award-winning Saturday Night Live writer, and originator of thedarkly charming character "Mr. Mike," awoke with what he believed was simply another of the migraines that had tormented him throughout his life. He got out of bed, went to his bathroom and took some medication to relieve the pain.
----Later, he awoke a second time exclaiming, "Oh my God!!"
----His wife, Cheryl Hardwicke, in the bed beside him, reported that his eyes were the color of blood and that she could see bolts of "lighning flash behind his eyeballs." She immediately telephoned EMS.
----In the ambulance on the way to St. Vincent's Hospital, Michael went into a convulsive seizure. Three hours later, a doctor informed Ms. Hardwicke that Michael had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He was now officially "brain dead." His body was put on life support, his organs donated to children.
Read the rest here.
___
Etc.
![]()
* 'I Hate Being Lion Fodder': A conversation between artist Kara Walker and Darius James
* Darius James reviews Saab Lofton's Anarchist Democracy
* Oliver Hardt's documentary BLACK DEUTSCHLAND is an intimate exploration of black life in Germany. It features Darius James, a.o. Read about it here.
* The Negrophobia Website
* Read about and buy Darius James's nonfiction book That's Blaxploitation!: Roots of the Baadasssss 'Tude (Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury) (St. Martins Press, 1995)
----
*
p.s. Hey. Negrophobia is such a great novel. When oh when will some publisher get the brains to reprint it? As for me, I think today I'm on my way via train and then plane from Naoshima to the Japanese island of Yakushima, which is supposed to be pretty amazing. Take care.
Seeing as how 'Downtown (New York) Writing' has recently been celebrated and studied in big, fat books by Brandon Stosuy and Marvin Taylor, I thought I'd draw attention to one of the most extraordinary and undervalued novels to come out of that scene. At the time Negrophobia was published in 1992, Darius James was best known for his controversial 'Ask Dr. Snakeskin' column in Penthouse magazine as well as for some stories he'd published in the East Village lit. zines like Between C&D, et. al. His ferocious, wacky fiction, whose acknowledged precedents include the great early novels of Ishmael Reed (Mumbo Jumbo,The Freelance Pallbearers), as well as much that is non-literary -- Ralph Bashki's long banned animation feature 'Coonskin,' free jazz, Richard Pryor -- was well known to local friends and colleagues like Kathy Acker, Lynne Tillman, Patrick McGrath, Gary Indiana, and others, including myself. I think we all just assumed that when Negrophobia carried his work beyond Manhattan, Darius was going to be a star, an avant-garde superhero writer a la Burroughs and Acker. But his raucous style and subversive mode of confronting racist attitudes by embracing racist stereotypes were frequently misunderstood at the time, and his work was even denounced as racist itself by certain prominent Black activists. Despite the hubbub and some great reviews, the novel was not a big success. It accrued the requisite cult following then went gradually out of print. Darius didn't help his own cause by being one of the least prolific fiction writers imaginable. He has yet to publish another book of fiction, and his only subsequent book was an uneven but occasionally stunning nonfiction book about the history of blaxploitation films which is noted below. Still, Darius may be a slowpoke, but he's one of he most gifted contemporary American fiction writers in my opinion, and Negrophobia is a singular mindblower of a novel that I think you should do yourself the favor of reading.
_________
Description
'Negrophobia (St. Martins Press, 1992) is written in the form of a screenplay, but no movie version of it exists so far. (There had been discussions about an animated movie version, and a live theatrical production has been long in the works.) The novel becomes a big screen on which Darius James projects reality and fiction, consciousness and sub-consciousness, dreams and fears of not just an American, but a whole western society where racism is in people's conscience. The book is actually a journey inside this racism.----'All the characters in this book are cartoon–like. James has created a pyramid of racist stereotypes with supernatural powers. Negrophobia describes the strange and hallucinating adventures of a white, drug-addled teenage girl called Bubbles Brazil, and she has all the typical racial stereotypes of African-American people in her head. She lives in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, is a rich girl who hates going to school with "jigaboos" since they’ve turned the high school hallways into a mad spectacle of sex, drugs and violence.
----'Bubbles finds herself transported into a nightmare dreamscape, and she is taken there through the voodoo of a demonic Aunt Jemima called "the Maid". This Voodoo spell throws Bubbles in a parallel world of grotesque visions of racism. She now experiences racism on her own, and suddenly every racial stereotype about black people comes to life.
----'Along the way she meets "a Negro cyborg", Uncle H. Rap Remus (who rapes little children), Malcolm X, she gets beaten up by a group of Ninja-Queens in her schools bathroom, meets a bunch of cartoon savages with grass skirts, who dream of social welfare, crackhead homeboys fantasizing about Spike Lee, a zombie Elvis, and Walt Disney, who wants to take over America and establish a Gestapo state.'-- from the Negrophobia website
___________
Short excerpt:
Bubbles (v.o.):My high school was overridden with niggas. Not the slow-witted, slow-shufflin’, eyeball-rollin’ flapjack- flippin’ niggas in the brownstone off Central Park West. Or the upwardly mobile, paper-bag-colored Klingon niggas – the nightmarish kind!
Mindless angel-dusted darkies slobbering insane single syllables, flicking switchblades and flashing straightrazor. Hip-Hoppity jungle bunnies in bright colored clothes, carrying large, loud radios we white wits call "Spadios", who drank bubbling purple carbonates and ate fried pork rinds and bag after bag of dehydrated potato slices caked with orange dust. Crotch-clawin’ niggas who talked Deputy Dawg and shot dope. Saucer-lipped ragoons who called me the "Ozark Mountyin She-Devil" and asked to feel my lunch money. Percussive porch monkeys who fart with their faces to a heavy-metal beat.
These were the kind of niggas my daddy warned me about. The kind of niggas my daddy said would whisk me off to the Isle of Unrestrained Negros far, far away, and turn me into a coalblack pickaninny with a nappy ribbon top and white button eyes if I wasn’t a good girl and didn’t do as daddy said.
______
Quotes: *
"I wanted to set up a situation where a reader had to confront his own racist thinking. And I wanted to talk about this in the book: that this culture – that popular culture – is predicted on the fact that it finds black people funny."-- Darius James" ...these cartoons in and of themselves aren’t intended to perpetuate racism. Rather, they were designed to subvert it(...) One of the ideas for me was that the reader himself, who might have a racist thought after reading Negrophobia, would become ill and throw up. But magically, I would like the reader to step back and look at the absurdity of these images and laugh: laugh at the images, laugh at their own racism and not feel cowed by it. And also, black people should laugh at these images and realize that these images are not reflection of black people but rather a reflection of some diseased mind, which is a real distinction. Because some people – and not a lot of them – became critical of the book because they confuse what I’m writing about with actual lives of black people. My book has nothing to do with the real live of black people. It has to do with mapping out the terrain of a racist psychology and making fun of that."-- Darius James
* Quotes taken from an interview with DJ by Cups Magazine. Read the entirety here.
_____
Buy it:
Order copies of the hardcover edition for as little as $1.14 here.Order copies of the paperback edition for as little as $5.15 here.
_____________________
The Negrophobia art show:
In 2001, Darius James collaborated with the artist Mark Brandenburg to create an art exhibition version of Negrophobia. It was held at Laura Mars Grp. in Berlin, and you can read about it here.__________________________________
Short fiction: 'Welcome to Sambo’s World'
The Talking Dreads’ white-gloved hands bookend the words:
“THE ULTIMATE PLAN FOR THE DEGENERATE WHITE MAN”
The walls of the image-chamber spin with lights and color, projecting a holographic mirage of a small rural town in mid-air suspension. Circled by a nimbus of phosphorescent murk, the ' disembodied head speaks in a smug, no-nonsense voice.
TALKING DREADS
On the surface, “Garvey’s Corners” is a town as typical and serene as any other on the golden plains (of America’s wheat belt.
Dawn. As the sun rises over the small Midwestern town of “Garvey’s Corner,” a wizened Black Man in blue-denim overalls pushes a junk cart strung with clanging pots and pans. He drums his wares with two metal spoons, calling out in bluesy sing-song.
Read the rest here.
__________________________________________
Darius James on the death of Michael O'Donoghue:
----"One of the great disservices of western civilization that does us no favors at all," Michael O'Donoghue told me one Sunday afternoon as he sat curled on the sofa in the chandeliered living room of his Chelsea condo, sipping smoke from the gold-tipped filter of a Sobraine Black Russian cigarette, "is that mask you see in theater--the two Greek masks, comedy and tragedy--as if there was any fuckin' difference between one and the other!
----"Things can be both funny and not-funny at the same time. You don't need to separate between the two. They're both basically the same thing."
----As dawn broke on the morning of October 7, 1994, Michael O'Donoghue, two-time Emmy Award-winning Saturday Night Live writer, and originator of thedarkly charming character "Mr. Mike," awoke with what he believed was simply another of the migraines that had tormented him throughout his life. He got out of bed, went to his bathroom and took some medication to relieve the pain.
----Later, he awoke a second time exclaiming, "Oh my God!!"
----His wife, Cheryl Hardwicke, in the bed beside him, reported that his eyes were the color of blood and that she could see bolts of "lighning flash behind his eyeballs." She immediately telephoned EMS.
----In the ambulance on the way to St. Vincent's Hospital, Michael went into a convulsive seizure. Three hours later, a doctor informed Ms. Hardwicke that Michael had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He was now officially "brain dead." His body was put on life support, his organs donated to children.
Read the rest here.
___
Etc.
* 'I Hate Being Lion Fodder': A conversation between artist Kara Walker and Darius James
* Darius James reviews Saab Lofton's Anarchist Democracy
* Oliver Hardt's documentary BLACK DEUTSCHLAND is an intimate exploration of black life in Germany. It features Darius James, a.o. Read about it here.
* The Negrophobia Website
* Read about and buy Darius James's nonfiction book That's Blaxploitation!: Roots of the Baadasssss 'Tude (Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury) (St. Martins Press, 1995)
----
*
p.s. Hey. Negrophobia is such a great novel. When oh when will some publisher get the brains to reprint it? As for me, I think today I'm on my way via train and then plane from Naoshima to the Japanese island of Yakushima, which is supposed to be pretty amazing. Take care.