The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger
By Cecil Brown; Henry Louis Jr Gates (Introduction by)
(Frog Books, Paperback, 9781583942109, 224pp.)
Publication Date: July 29, 2008
Other Editions of This Title: Paperback (October 1991)
Categories: Historical - General
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“If you're black you don't need to get at anything. You're already there. You can live right out of your insides.” So says the antihero of this legendary novel that reimagines the Bible’s prodigal son as a young black man in post-Civil Rights-era America. George Washington—one of his many aliases—is a classic trickster figure, a blend of con artist, deep thinker, and willing object of white women’s sexual fantasies. Fed up with life in racist America, he leaves his rural South for Denmark on a curious quest, determined to discover if there is “any mother fucker in this despiteful world who ever told himself the truth.” In Denmark he spends his days bantering with fellow black expatriates and his nights bedding a series of white women who project their desires on him. Inevitably, these worlds collide, with Washington, aka Anthony Miller, aka Paul Winthrop, aka Mr. Jiveass Nigger, increasingly alienated in a world of opportunists. A return to America after his self-imposed exile promises transformation, but is Washington too far gone? Cecil Brown brings blistering prose, unabashed eroticism, and biting satire to this controversial masterpiece that’s as timely today as when it was first published.
Cecil Brown holds a PhD in African American Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. His other books include Days Without Weather, Stagolee Shot Billy, and his autobiography, Coming Up Down Home. He lives in Berkeley.
Foreword contributor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and holder of the distinguished title of the Alphonse Fletcher, Jr. University Professor at Harvard University.
“This is a book that turns you on; it tells you how it feels to be a young, black male American in a permissive society of white women.”
—Chester Himes, author of If He Hollers, Let Him Go
“Flimflamboyantly erotic ... audacious ... dramatic ... Mr. Brown is a born pornographer gone straight.”
—The New York Times
“Brown's best-selling The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger, published in 1969, [is] a picaresque novel ˆ la Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, infused with a Black Power sensibility.”
—Scott McLemee
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