by Darius James
DARIUS JAMES (b. 1954) is a writer and spoken-word performance artist. He is also the author of That’s Blaxploitation!: Roots of the Baadasssss ’Tude (Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury); Voodoo Stew; and Froggie Chocolate’s Christmas Eve. His writing has appeared in multiple publications, including The Village Voice, Vibe, and Spin, and he is the co-writer and narrator of the 2012 film The United States of Hoodoo. He lives in Connecticut.
AMY ABUGO ONGIRI is an associate professor and the Jill Beck Director of Film Studies at Lawrence University. She is the author of Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic and her writing has appeared in The Journal of African American History, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Postmodern Culture, and other publications.
NEGROPHOBIA
An Urban Parable
DARIUS JAMES
Introduction by
AMY ABUGO ONGIRI
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1992 by Darius James; author’s preface copyright © 2019
by Darius James
Introduction copyright © 2019 by Amy Abugo Ongiri
All rights reserved.
Cover image: Natasha Xavier, All Cats Are Black in the Dark; courtesy of the artist
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: James, Darius, author. | Ongiri, Amy Abugo, 1968– writer of introduction.
Title: Negrophobia : an urban parable / by Darius James ; introduction by Amy Abugo Ongiri.
Description: New York : New York Review Books, [2019] | Series: New York Review Books Classics
Identifiers: LCCN 2018029645| ISBN 9781681373294 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681373485 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Racism—Fiction. | African Americans—Fiction. | Humorous stories. | Parables. | BISAC: FICTION / Satire. | FICTION / African
American / General.
Classification: LCC PS3560.A37887 N4 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029645
ISBN 978-1-68137-348-5
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
Preface
NEGROPHOBIA
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
THIS IS a brilliant book whose time has come and whose time has always been now. When Darius James first published Negrophobia in 1992, celebrity culture was only beginning to grow into the frenzy that would make stars out of people whose only apparent talent was celebrity itself, a frenzy that would culminate in the triumphant election of a reality star to the office of the president. James was already interrogating image culture and the transcendence of visual media throughout global culture with a novel structured as a screenplay and an urban parable that was more dystopian fantasy than an instructional allegory. The novel’s form and style cunningly anticipates the death of print culture and the importance of visual culture for post-print media. Long before the advent of Trump, Snapchat, and Instagram, James explored and exploded the violence, power, and eroticism of image culture’s relationship to anti-black racism, and he did so with a satire so sharp that it was meant to draw blood, taking readers on a brutal journey through some of the most disturbingly sexualized and repulsively racist imagery imaginable—a satyr with a massive penis that disappears when it is reached for; tar babies, jigaboos, and coons; the Negromancer performing the dark arts; and “a rubber-clad dominatrix with an enema tube coiled around her arm.” Martin Luther King Jr. appears briefly in a bloodstained shirt riddled with bullet holes. One epigraph to the book quotes Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan as he makes an appearance on the popular eighties and nineties talk show Phil Donahue: “I think you are judging us by the state of your own mind, and that is not necessarily the mind of black people.”
James has described Negrophobia as a “vanishing spell,” and has noted that his sole aim in writing the novel was “to make people throw up.” While it is true that the text is visceral and confrontational, it is also true that it is guided by a startling amount of humor that revolves around the grotesque. His story opens with an “EXTREME CLOSE-UP OF A JOINT balanced on the rim of a silver ashtray. With cigarette paper the color of beach-bleached bone, twisted rather than rolled, and winding with arteries of thin black wrinkles emphasized in shadow, the joint looks like a shriveled, mummified cock stained by a ring of red lipstick.” It ends with the Cream of Wheat Chef mooning the ever-present camera. The humor often comes from the saturation of racist imagery that is both completely familiar and at the same time defamiliarized by the outrageousness of the scenarios that the author creates. In an interview in Bomb magazine, James responded to questions about the more visceral qualities of the book by citing the confrontational challenge that the repetition of racist images posed as an invitation of sorts: “I just wanted the reader to deal with the images and therefore confront those same images on their own terms.” It’s a funky invitation in the classic style of Rudy Ray Moore’s ghetto House Party Album: The Dirty Dozens, in which Lady Reed welcomes guests with a promise: “Everybody’s talking about funky but here’s where it’s at. Over here at Rudy Ray Moore’s house we’re going to drag you into the alleyway, put some garbage on top of you, and make you real squishy.”
Darius James is an active participant in Voodoo and believes in the power and mysticism of words. His work does not trade in the “authenticity” and “realness” that so much black cultural production is forced to trade in when guiding non-black readers into worlds and spaces they are, in fact, physically afraid to visit. In James’s work, the ghetto, the plantation, and the prison cell are set loose from their original referents to exist in the world of the symbolic racist logic that created them. Authenticity is not on the table: In Negrophobia, the copy not only eclipses but often comes to life and replaces the original. Mammies are armed with lethal grits and lawn jockeys wield knives. In his other, now out-of-print work of genius, That’s Blaxploitation!: Roots of the Baadasssss ’Tude (Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury)—a loose guide to black popular cinema of the 1970s—a full-length flip-book embedded in its margins re-creates, in cartoon form, a scene with characters from a classic blaxploitation film in which one character beheads the other in the most irreverent way possible.
Avant-garde work of this nature is not often recognized for its genius when it is created by artists of African descent. The experimental nature of James’s writing and its mishmash incorporation of references—everything from classic cartoons and voodoo culture to the teachings of Paulo Freire—means that it both courts controversy and remains incomprehensible to many. Nevertheless, the novel amassed a huge cult following that included actor Johnny Depp and celebrated experimental novelist Kathy Acker, certainly a primary influence and one who called James “a great writer.” The renowned visual artist Kara Walker has said in an interview with Darius James in DB ArtMag, “I read Negrophobia when I was still in grad school. . . . It was one of those good but rare occasions when I thought there might be one other person in the world that would get what I was doing.”
Because realism has been the primary mode of address for African American artistic and cultural production, there is not much precedent for James’s work within the canon of African American literature. Realism is often u
sed to facilitate protest and ease the process of identifying with the Other. From the narratives written by enslaved Africans making a powerful plea for freedom to the hip-hop culture that has become the contemporary measure of authentic blackness, African American cultural production has served as a means through which African Americans could both claim subjectivity and make a plea for equal rights. But the demand for realism in our cultural production also feeds a voyeuristic desire on the part of mainstream American culture to get close to the spectacle of African American suffering and life but not close enough to actually get hurt. It is no wonder that James said he wanted to make people throw up, since reading his novel is like a gut punch to the stomach.
There is a strong tradition of satire within the African American literary tradition, but in many ways this satire relies on realism as its primary mode of expression. George Schuyler’s novel Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933–1940 is perhaps the closest precedent to Negrophobia in its utilization of the fantastical, its caricatures of contemporary cultural figures, and its play with notions of the scientific. In this novel, a scientist loosely based on the sociologist and NAACP founder W. E. B. Du Bois discovers a scientific procedure by which African Americans can whiten their skin. The title Black No More refers to the commercial name given to the product once it’s made available to the general public and, like Negrophobia, the novel is as much a send-up of the eroticism of racial desire writ large as it is a critique of whiteness. Its protagonist Max Disher desperately wants to be white so that he can woo a woman who had rejected him at a nightclub because she “never dance[s] with niggers.” Max Disher changes the entire trajectory of his life—including his race—to pursue her and sadly finds whites “little different than Negroes, except that they were uniformly less courteous and less interesting.” He finally finds the woman he desires at a meeting of white supremacists who have convened specifically to fight the effects of Black No More. The woman that Max pursues so ardently comes to life in Negrophobia as the teenaged blond bombshell Bubbles Brazil, who, instead of being chased by a misguided yet earnest suitor of the “wrong” race, is forced through a tableau of violently racialized scenarios saturated with a complicated amalgamation of racial stereotypes and anti-black imagery, including a white supremacist Mickey Mouse who sings about racial genocide, a malevolent mammy figure who chains Bubbles up and cuts her hair, and a series of tar babies who sexually assault her.
It makes sense that Darius James’s wildly visual experiments in Negrophobia have a strong precedent in the world of fine arts. In 1972, Betye Saar used black Americana knickknacks to create her explosive mixed-media piece The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, in which the mammy figure transcends perpetual servitude in becoming an armed terrorist. Robert Colescott’s 1975 re-creation of Emanuel Leutze’s iconic 1851 painting Washington Crossing the Delaware populates the picture with stereotypical images of mammies, a cook, field hands, and minstrels rather than American patriots. He titled his painting George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware, a play on American iconography reminiscent of James’s use of historical figures to expose the cynical way in which history can be repurposed for any agenda. The reanimated rotting corpse of Malcolm X in James’s “Rocky-Horror Negro Show” lectures on the evils of eating pork in a manner that highlights his assassination and the ongoing trauma which marks his absence. Echoing Saar’s work, Renee Cox’s 1998 collage print The Liberation of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben repurposes the two advertising icons as heroes of black liberation, while installation artist Fred Wilson has consistently made use of mammy figurines and other racist collectibles, as in his 1995 mixed-media piece Mine/Yours that overlays a collection of racist knickknacks onto a historical photograph of an African American family. Perhaps closest to James’s work are the paintings and prints of Michael Ray Charles whose use of racist iconography still draws the ire of the museumgoing public. Charles’s 1995 color screen print You Only Live Once from his Forever Free series features an advertising poster with a minstrel figure slapping the rear end of a blonde, naked white woman balanced on a pedestal on her hands and knees. Both of them appear in the bitten frame of an apple. Though these pieces form a kind of precedent for James’s novel, they all share a much deeper investment in reclamation and empowerment than Negrophobia, where the iconography from the racist past floats freely and horrifically away from the demand to make good for the transgressions of the past.
The experimental musician Sun Ra spoke of himself as the manifestation of the past in the present moment saying, “I came from a dream that the black man dreamed long ago. I am actually a presence sent to you by your ancestors.”* It would not be wrong to think of James’s work or James himself in this light. Negrophobia eviscerates the historical past by exposing the ugly innards of its symbolic logic, compressing time in such a way that the past is perpetually present but also perpetually asynchronous. Aunt Jemima stirs grits; JFK’s embalmed head “complete with exit wounds, scuttles across the floor on spindly spider legs”; a zombified Elvis performs oral sex while Mickey Mouse seamlessly morphs into Christ; a character called Negromancer insists that African Americans are really “Neo-African Americans—hostages misplaced in time, captives of a racist hist’ry.”
Mark Dery coined the term “Afrofuturism” in 1994, just two years after Negrophobia was first published. The large canon of texts connected to this label exists at the interface of science, futurity, and people of African descent, and not only includes creative work situated squarely within the realm of science fiction, such as the projections of Sun Ra, Samuel Delany, and Octavia Butler, but also work situated in a more liminal space between genres and media forms like that of Darius James and George Schulyer. The scientific machinations of Black No More are echoed in Negrophobia by “The Sambo Institute for Artificial Caucasians,” whose slogan “White Today for a Black Tomorrow” inverts Schuyler’s sales pitch, and for good reason: In Darius James’s universe, Afrofuturism means the Afropast and the Afropresent. Throughout James’s novel we meet the likes of “an androided nigga” and “the Negro of the future.” Like Sun Ra, James sees time and space as a construct that very quickly unravels under pressure. He knows that the imagery and ideology of the historic past cannot simply disappear when Little Black Sambo books disappear off elementary-school shelves and tar babies vanish from the cartoon universe. These racist constructs still breathe beneath the surface of the present and can be made to come surging back with the right voodoo incantations, which James is more than willing to supply. He once described the role of the satirist as “magickal. To curse the enemy. The best satirists use the targets of satire as a weapon against itself. And the very best subvert the target while staying within the limits of its definition.”
One of the most compelling sections of the novel arises when James seamlessly mixes the seemingly incoherent rantings of the black Muppets (or “Buppets” as he calls them), who reference everything from Eldridge Cleaver to the 1989 Central Park rape case, with lines directly drawn from the videotaped confession of “subway vigilante” Bernhard Goetz. Goetz’s 1984 shooting of four black teenagers on a New York subway car ignited racialized debates about crime and punishment that helped propel then U.S. attorney Rudolph Giuliani to public prominence as he defended Goetz’s actions. This potent remix reminds us that our current present moment, in which Giuliani has piggybacked on Trump in the national news cycle, is tied to the 1984 and 1989 controversies that catapulted them both to fame as hard-liners in the racialized “law and order” debate—Trump literally called for the now-exonerated black teenagers to be lynched.
Such amalgamating moments make Negrophobia seem like an act of prophecy as well as an act of satirical genius, for not only did the author anticipate the complete exoneration of the Central Park Five but also understood Giuliani’s and Trump’s detrimental behavior as having no effect at all on their subsequent political careers. The collapsing of the past, pre
sent, and future elucidate and eviscerate racism as it appears to a third eye that sees beyond boundaries of time, space, and place. In the real world, Trump has refused to comment on the Central Park rape case that was so formative in the original creation of himself as a political personality, save to stand by his early position. In the world of Darius James, an army of metal lawn jockeys watch a vulgar cartoon Buckwheat character curse on-screen before committing murder. In the real world, Bernhard Goetz lives on into his seventies, running a store in New York City called Vigilante Electronics while two of the four African American teenagers he shot are now dead, including James Ramseur who committed suicide on the twenty-seventh anniversary of the shooting. In James’s world, the Buppets discuss the marketability of their sexually violent movies on TV as they hammer “hambone rhythms on their heads.” In the real world, each American decade has its dead or accused black teenagers whose bodies served as cannon fodder for national public-policy debate: the thirties had the Scottsboro Boys, the forties had George Stinney Jr., the fifties had Emmett Till, the eighties had the four victims of the subway vigilante and the Central Park Five, and contemporary times have given us Tamir Rice, Tray-von Martin, Michael Brown, Jordan Davis, and countless others. In the world of Negrophobia, Farrakhan is physically transformed into Fred MacMurray in order to “drive the whyte man crazy!” Everything doesn’t make sense and conversely also makes perfect sense.
In Amiri Baraka’s 1964 play, Dutchman, Clay, the play’s young black protagonist, rejects his white seductress-tormentor’s attempt to explain or understand him: “You don’t know anything except what’s there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device.” Similarly to Dutchman, the reader must negotiate the complex symbolic universe of Negrophobia through the lens of the white bombshell Bubbles Brazil. However, unlike the prescriptive nature of Dutchman that suggests a black man must reject whiteness in order to gain a truer sense of self and thus transcend racism, Negrophobia allows no possibility for refusal and no sense of latent subjectivity awaiting discovery. Violent representation of racism is just that. It cannot be emptied of its violence to make something better; it cannot be redeemed. Only the void of not-knowing-and-not-seeing racism remains. Without whiteness, Bubbles says, “I was presence without appearance, a being without basis, a creature without context—an invisible—a colorless network of organs and entrails in translucent casing.”
