Stunning for her daring originality, the author of Negroland gives us what she calls “a temperamental autobiography,” comprised of visceral, intimate fragments that fuse criticism and memoir.
Margo Jefferson constructs a nervous system with pieces of different lengths and tone, conjoining arts writing (poem, song, performance) with life writing (history, psychology). The book’s structure is determined by signal moments of her life, those that trouble her as well as those that thrill and restore. In this nervous system:
– The sounds of a black spinning disc of a 1950’s jazz LP as intimate and instructive as a parent’s voice.
– The muscles and movements of a ballerina, spliced with those of an Olympic runner: template for what a female body could be.
– Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Topsy finds her way into the art of Kara Walker and the songs of C�cile McLorin Salvant.
– Bing Crosby and Ike Turner become alter egos.
– W.E.B. DuBois and George Eliot meet illicitly, as he appropriates lines from her story “The Hidden Veil” to write his famous “behind the veil” passages in The Souls of BlackFolk.
– The words of multiple others (writers, singers, film characters, friends, family) act as prompts and as dialogue.
The fragments of this brilliant book, while not neglecting family, race, and class, are informed by a kind of aesthetic drive: longing, ecstasy, or even acute ambivalence. Constructing a nervous system is Jefferson’s relentlessly galvanizing mis en scene for unconventional storytelling as well as a platform for unexpected dramatis personae.
3.0 out of 5 stars Read Negroland
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 30, 2022
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In the Sunday Times Ms. Jefferson references two books which influenced her in writing her Nervous System book-annotations by John Keene and Gallery of Clouds by Rachel Eisendrath. Both are marvels. For those recommendations I am grateful. In the same way Negroland recalls and recreates African American life from the sixties and the not so subtle difficulties of relative success in a segregated world.
This new book which embraces experimentalism falls short of the real verbal and thought experiments of Keene and Eisendrath. If Josephine Baker is somehow Ms. Jefferson in disguise further explication was required. But maybe I missed something in Nervous system.
Margo Jefferson Author Of Constructing a Nervous System Book received her B.A. from Brandeis University, where she graduated cum laude, and her M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She became an associate editor at Newsweek in 1973 and stayed at the magazine until 1978. She then served as an assistant professor at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at New York University from 1979 to 1983 and from 1989 to 1991. Since then she has taught at the Columbia University School of the Arts, where she is now professor of professional practice in writing. Jefferson also taught at The New School’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts.
She joined The New York Times in 1993, initially as a book reviewer, then went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1995. She also served as the newspaper’s theater critic in 2004. In addition to the Times, she has written for Vogue, New York Magazine, The Nation, and Guernica.
Jefferson has a longstanding interest in jazz, and appeared in Ken Burns’s 2001 documentary series about the history of the music.
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