Discusses various aspects of birth, childhood, economics, marriage, family relationships, politics, society, religion, and art common to many native African people.

Roots of Time: A Portrait of African Life and Culture,

Margo Jefferson

DOUBLEDAY

Who was the turn-of-the-century hipster? Who is free enough of the hipster taint to write its history without contempt or nostalgia? Why do we want to declare the neo-hipster moment over, when the hipster's "global brand" has just reached apotheosis? 
 A panel of writers invited the public to join an investigation into the rise and fall of the contemporary hipster. Their debate took place at the New School University in New York City. 
 In addition to the panel transcript, the book includes responses from critics Jennifer Baumgardner, Patrice Evans aka The Assimilated Negro, and Margo Jefferson, as well as essays on douchebags, Hasidism versus hipsters, the Hipster Feminine, and the sneaker shop Alife Rivington.

What Was The Hipster?: A Sociological Investigation

Politics & Social Sciences

Mark Greif

Dayna Tortorici

Christian Lorentzen

Jace Clayton

Reid Pillifant

Rob Horning

Jennifer Baumgardner

Patrice Evans

Rob Moor

Christopher Glazek

Anthropology

n+1 Foundation

On Michael Jackson

Who is Michael Jackson and what does it mean to call him a "What Is It"? What do P.T. Barnum, Peter Pan, and Edgar Allan Poe have to do with our fascination with Jackson? How did his curious Victorian upbringing and his tenure as a child prodigy on the "chitlin' circuit" inform his character and multiplicty of selves? How is Michael Jackson's celebrity related to the outrageous popularity of nineteenth-century minstrelsy? What is the perverse appeal of child stars for grown-ups and what is the price of such stardom for these children and for us? What uncanniness provoked Michael Jackson to become "Alone of All His Race, Alone of All Her Sex," while establishing himself as an undeniably great performer with neo-Gothic, dandy proclivities and a producer of visionary music videos? What do we find so unnerving about Michael Jackson's presumed monstrosity? In short, how are we all of us implcated?

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

BOOKS ON TAPE]

At once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative, celebratory and elegiac--here is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of Margo Jefferson's rarefied upbringing and education among a black elite concerned with distancing itself from whites and the black generality while tirelessly measuring itself against both. Born in upper-crust black Chicago--her father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation's oldest black hospital&#894; her mother was a socialite--Margo Jefferson has spent most of her life among (call them what you will) the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society. Since the nineteenth century, they have stood apart, these inhabitants of Negroland, "a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty." Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments--the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of postracial America--Margo Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions. Aware as it is of heartwrenching despair and depression, this book is a triumphant paean to the grace of perseverance.

Negroland: A Memoir

Community & Culture

Blackstone Audio,Inc.

A deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture seen through the prism of the author's rarefied upbringing and education among Chicago's black elite. At once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative, celebratory and elegiac -- here is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of Margo Jefferson's rarefied upbringing and education among a black elite concerned with distancing itself from whites and the black generality while tirelessly measuring itself against both. Born in upper-crust black Chicago -- her father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation's oldest black hospital; her mother was a socialite -- Margo Jefferson has spent most of her life among (call them what you will) the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society. Since the nineteenth century, they have stood apart, these inhabitants of Negroland, ''a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty.'' Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments -- the civil-rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of postracial America -- Margo Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions. Aware as it is of heartwrenching despair and depression, this book is a triumphant paean to the grace of perseverance.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION The daughter of a successful paediatrician and a fashionable socialite, Margo Jefferson spent her childhood among Chicago's black elite. She calls this society 'Negroland': 'a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty'. With privilege came expectation. Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments - the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of post-racial America - Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions.

Historical

Granta Books

On Michael Jackson [Paperback] [May 03, 2018] Jefferson, Margo

Granta

Constructing a Nervous System

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 - 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 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 Black Folk .- 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 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.

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Books by Margo Jefferson