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Negrophobia: An Urban Parable
Darius James’s scabrous, unapologetically raunchy, and truly hilarious and scary Negrophobia collides head on with the hydra-headed phenomenon of American racism. A screenplay for the mind, a performance on the page, a work of poetry, a mad mix of genres and styles, a novel in the tradition of William S. Burroughs and Ishmael Reed that is like no other novel, Negrophobia begins with the blonde bombshell Bubbles Brazil succumbing to a voodoo spell and entering the inner darkness of her own shiny being. Here crackheads parade in the guise of Muppets, Muslims beat conga drums, Negroes have numbers for names, and H Rap Remus demands the total and instantaneous extermination of the white race through spontaneous combustion. By the end of it all, after going on a weird trip for the ages, Bubbles herself is strangely transformed.
209 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 1, 1992
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 65 reviews
May 20, 2019
“We need only turn to that tome of truth and wisdom, the King James Bible, which says, in rich word and apt metaphor, blackness is disease, death, damnation, and despair, as well as basic sin and evil, to understand that the first Negro was Satan. This is why Negroes are born with horns and barbed tails. And why Africa is hot.”
The one thing Black folk have for sure achieved since Darius James wrote Negrophobia is being seen. That’s really all I mean, we’re visible now outside of Ralph Ellison’s Samboism and hair-conking honky-catering. We’re on TV with faces askance pondering the rituals of whytie for a change, or winning grammys, or writing about The Other, or becoming the president. And people know we’re doing it. We finally fit into the scheme of American cultural fantasy that we’ve been pushing on ourselves since the depression. Its like Mickey Mouse realized he wasn’t a magician after all, and it was a bastion of burheads cleaning our his lair in Fantasia 2000 that he didn’t quite notice before.
But what still makes James’ cynicism so ripe (and so fucking funny) is that this is only an indication of how things have gotten worse. We’re proud to base our cultural identity on being Afro-expats that became civilized enough to get a welfare check, but that’s as far as we’re willing to go. Or maybe that’s as far as we can go, claiming anything else will place it alongside this black simulation megaplex enterprises and glom it on to the rotten whole of the American world-eater.
This novel was extremely vulgar, but not as vulgar as I thought it would be. That is one of the reasons I liked it so much, it became apparent that James held some things in such high regard that he couldn’t toss them in to the Manhattan technicolor cesspool he was concocting. Off the top of my head three figures are Franz Fanon, Sun Ra (sort of) and, strangely, Louis Armstrong. I think it could be fun to build a list of things that he may find untouchable (or chose not to defile at least) and imagine a better world where black art wasn’t so tainted by whyte conceptions of it.
June 17, 2020
A scabrous and surreal novel written in script form, the bastard lovechild of Larry Cohen and Dušan Makavejev, inverting racist tropes in cartoonish scenes of righteous and hilarious incoherence to perform a brutal comic KO.
April 6, 2019
Maldoror for the MAGA minions.
June 16, 2024
As scorched-earth and onyx-black a satire as any I’ve encountered. Up there with Hogg in its gleeful, pitiless vengeance. Like if Williams Burroughs hadn’t been white, probed race instead of language, and written The Atrocity Exhibition over of Naked Lunch.
February 27, 2022
Relentless and deeply iconoclastic, this… Play? Novel? Endless rambling? Feels acidic, but never stern, playful but serious and impactful, and the genuine level of transgression that it unearths and displays while exploring the chimeric and sublime beast of racism still feels shocking and electrifying 30 years later.
December 16, 2014
A satire in which a snotty, overprivileged, and despite trying-too-hard-to-be-with-it, racist brat is hexed after being insulting & disrespectful to the family maid. But rather than bringing external curses on her, it does what the best hexes should----stirs up all of her own subconscious garbage, stereotypes and projections into an epic hallucinogenic fever dream. Darius calls this Negrophobia, and though it was published in the 90's, of late it's pretty damn clear that American culture still has a scorching case of it.
And oh yeah, obligatory "know the author" disclaimer again.
And oh yeah, obligatory "know the author" disclaimer again.
February 27, 2019
I knew I was going to love this book when, in the new preface original to this edition, the author states the following: "The only thing a new generation of readers might need to know is that this book is not a 'safe space.' It's loaded with 'triggers,' and I hope NEGROPHOBIA gives you nightmares." Darius James' NEGROPHOBIA is a difficult novel to classify (in fact, in some ways it's more like a screenplay to a Surrealist non-existent movie). Imagine Screamin' Jay Hawkins and William S. Burroughs having a baby (with Kathy Acker acting as the surrogate) and you may get some idea of the nature of this work. Or perhaps a voodoo/splatterpunk ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, a psychedelic bad acid trip down the festering rabbit hole rectum of America's racist past, present and future (indeed, there are numerous references to the Alice books in the text itself). In her introduction Amy Abugo Ongiri likens the novel to 'Afrofuturism' (among other things), and while there are certainly sections of the book that bear witness to this observation, I would also say that NEGROPHOBIA could be read as a horror novel: certainly there are many allusions to the iconography of horror, what with zombies erupting from the Earth to disembowel the screaming masses, disgusting body horror, lycantrophic shape-shifting, leering satyrs, voodoo curses, necromancy, and, in perhaps the book's pièce de résistance, a gigantic Godzilla-sized nose monster. The novel could thus be seen through the lenses of the Grand Guignol tradition, and it's a delightful perverse and scatological narrative... and yet, unlike many humorless examples of transgressive fiction, there's also a playfulness and sense of humor at hand, and though not all of the satire works for me (the comparisons between Walt Disney's omnipresent empire and the Nazi Party seems a little done to death now, though perhaps it was a novelty when this book was first published, back in 1992), for the most part I feel the humor succeeds, and the prose is very rococo and even poetic at times. In any event, it's hard for me to say a bad word about a book that features a disembodied John F. Kennedy head ("complete with exit wounds") scuttling around the floor of a necromancer's laboratory on "spindly spider legs," or, for that matter, a massacre at Walt Disney World that concludes with Goofy's grinning head placed atop a wooden stake, with blood dripping from his eyes.
September 30, 2013
NAKED LUNCH gone funkadelic.
June 16, 2007
is it a novel? or a failed screenplay? or a crazed performance piece? I'm hoping it's all of those things. You just have to read it. IT's too bizarre to even describe. you'll think I'm just pulling it out of my ass.
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September 3, 2018hey did you go see recent feature film sorry to bother you? (you should have, bc it owned.) if you found your appetite whetted for cartoonish satire that nonetheless takes an unflinching look at race relations in america then run don't walk to your local used book repository. equal parts alice in wonderland and superjail, my primary beef wrt the work at hand is the way that bubbles disappears for big chunks of the narrative at a time, which, it's not as though she's an engaging or likable character in any regard, but in the absence of an onlooker to take in all the tableaux at hand here it's like the inferno by dante without what's-his-name, y'know? or maybe the point is that the reader becomes the onlooker? read it and let me know!
October 28, 2007
Another book that changed my life.
March 2, 2019
1/2 star
This is a novel that is supposed to address the issue of race and Darius James decides to take the route of magical realism to do so. This is by all means magical realism, kind of like Haruki Murakami meets Melvin Van Peebles. This is a mess, though. A screaming diarrhea kind of mess. This book loses itself in its magical realism and the elements pertaining to real-life people are meant to be humorous, but they are in actuality repulsive and in some cases immoral. There is a scene where JFK's wounded head is attached to spider legs and he is now thrilled that he could give himself a blowjob. Other moments include Uncle Remus raping a white boy, Walt Disney coming back to life from deep freeze as a bigot (Family Guy did this so much better), among so many other sick and twisted occurrences.
So where's the story? The central character is a snooty, blonde bombshell by the name of Bubbles Brazil. After putting down a heavyset, black maid because of her race, the maid puts a voodoo spell on her that will put her through an insane, magical realist experience that will make her see the world, and the black population, so much differently. From here, she goes through various occurrences where she is placed in situations that make no sense to the point that one is left wondering what should be taken out of this piece.
Why a half-star instead of zero stars? I do understand that this is meant to be magical realism, as it is classified as an "urban parable" and as far as that is concerned, there is a sense of direction. There is also that satirical, self-deprecation that these stereotypes are a formation of what others take them to being, but they have a right to share this world and breathe the same air as everyone else from every other background. As far as a story and execution is concerned, there is no story and an execution that is the equivalent to throwing a bowling ball backwards and hitting or tripping the other people from behind. Everything is rushed so rapidly and I had no idea what Bubbles was contributing to the plot aside from the fact she was a bigoted Alice Liddell who was entering this "wonderland" through voodoo (or through the "rabbit's anus") instead of "down the rabbit hole." This story written in both prose and play format is also riddled with unintended grammatical errors, such as Malcolm X's name being spelled "Malcom X" in a few lines. So in essence, a half-hearted effort gets one half of a star.
I have an idea as to where Darius James was getting at with this book, but it did absolutely nothing for me and just about lost me two-thirds through... at least as far as the story is concerned. The ending was just very strange and one that has left an indentation of how I see a particular product for an indefinitely period of time. Perhaps there is someone that sees this as art. I do not. I do not see this as art and if you wanted my opinion, I say avoid this book like you would a bathroom stall that has gone unflushed following an episode of diarrhea.
This is a novel that is supposed to address the issue of race and Darius James decides to take the route of magical realism to do so. This is by all means magical realism, kind of like Haruki Murakami meets Melvin Van Peebles. This is a mess, though. A screaming diarrhea kind of mess. This book loses itself in its magical realism and the elements pertaining to real-life people are meant to be humorous, but they are in actuality repulsive and in some cases immoral. There is a scene where JFK's wounded head is attached to spider legs and he is now thrilled that he could give himself a blowjob. Other moments include Uncle Remus raping a white boy, Walt Disney coming back to life from deep freeze as a bigot (Family Guy did this so much better), among so many other sick and twisted occurrences.
So where's the story? The central character is a snooty, blonde bombshell by the name of Bubbles Brazil. After putting down a heavyset, black maid because of her race, the maid puts a voodoo spell on her that will put her through an insane, magical realist experience that will make her see the world, and the black population, so much differently. From here, she goes through various occurrences where she is placed in situations that make no sense to the point that one is left wondering what should be taken out of this piece.
Why a half-star instead of zero stars? I do understand that this is meant to be magical realism, as it is classified as an "urban parable" and as far as that is concerned, there is a sense of direction. There is also that satirical, self-deprecation that these stereotypes are a formation of what others take them to being, but they have a right to share this world and breathe the same air as everyone else from every other background. As far as a story and execution is concerned, there is no story and an execution that is the equivalent to throwing a bowling ball backwards and hitting or tripping the other people from behind. Everything is rushed so rapidly and I had no idea what Bubbles was contributing to the plot aside from the fact she was a bigoted Alice Liddell who was entering this "wonderland" through voodoo (or through the "rabbit's anus") instead of "down the rabbit hole." This story written in both prose and play format is also riddled with unintended grammatical errors, such as Malcolm X's name being spelled "Malcom X" in a few lines. So in essence, a half-hearted effort gets one half of a star.
I have an idea as to where Darius James was getting at with this book, but it did absolutely nothing for me and just about lost me two-thirds through... at least as far as the story is concerned. The ending was just very strange and one that has left an indentation of how I see a particular product for an indefinitely period of time. Perhaps there is someone that sees this as art. I do not. I do not see this as art and if you wanted my opinion, I say avoid this book like you would a bathroom stall that has gone unflushed following an episode of diarrhea.
March 6, 2018
Disclaimer - I personally know the author. In spite of that, I really loved this breathless, devastating, and witty satire.
Negrophobia is equal parts maniacal lampoon and demented screenplay; a completely phantasmagoric ripping yarn. From the beginning, Darius James spins a story shaded in an incandescently perverse poetry, whirling off the very first page, simultaneously biting and slyly working out all those stale paradigms you thought were dead and gone but are sadly still alive and well in our “post-racist” society.
A satire of the highest degree, Negrophobia follows teen protagonist Bubbles Brazil as she both flaunts and confronts every - single - ugly - nefarious - racist -stereotype of black people. There is something to offend EVERYONE in this story. Pacing and imagery are all “turned up to eleven,” as Nigel Tufnell from SpinalTap might say. If Max Fleischer and Jonathan Swift dropped acid with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, this book would be the resulting love child of that psychedelic union. Puts a spell on you from the beginning, and won’t let go.
While there are some shortcomings with the writing - some uneven execution of the screenplay voice, and sometimes Bubbles disappears for long stretches as the narrative rolls on - this detracts very little from the book overall, and I still wholeheartedly recommend it, despite these craft issues.
Negrophobia’s electrified staccato vignettes are both completely depraved and wholly hilarious. Fair warning, though - this book is most emphatically NOT for the humorless reader, nor for the weak of mind. In fact, I would probably say consumption of buzz saw satire of this caliber should only be taken by prescription. However, if that were so, then the black market would inevitably be flooded by cheap knock-off copies. I would urge that you not be swayed by cheap imitators - demand the original! Take Negrophobia only as directed – TAKE IT ALL AT ONCE, in one sitting! Take it with a grain of salt, a pile ‘o Aunt Jemima flapjacks, and heaping helpings of K-Y jelly. Remember - stale paradigms are best left behind, and children have nightmares to wake up.
Negrophobia is equal parts maniacal lampoon and demented screenplay; a completely phantasmagoric ripping yarn. From the beginning, Darius James spins a story shaded in an incandescently perverse poetry, whirling off the very first page, simultaneously biting and slyly working out all those stale paradigms you thought were dead and gone but are sadly still alive and well in our “post-racist” society.
A satire of the highest degree, Negrophobia follows teen protagonist Bubbles Brazil as she both flaunts and confronts every - single - ugly - nefarious - racist -stereotype of black people. There is something to offend EVERYONE in this story. Pacing and imagery are all “turned up to eleven,” as Nigel Tufnell from SpinalTap might say. If Max Fleischer and Jonathan Swift dropped acid with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, this book would be the resulting love child of that psychedelic union. Puts a spell on you from the beginning, and won’t let go.
While there are some shortcomings with the writing - some uneven execution of the screenplay voice, and sometimes Bubbles disappears for long stretches as the narrative rolls on - this detracts very little from the book overall, and I still wholeheartedly recommend it, despite these craft issues.
Negrophobia’s electrified staccato vignettes are both completely depraved and wholly hilarious. Fair warning, though - this book is most emphatically NOT for the humorless reader, nor for the weak of mind. In fact, I would probably say consumption of buzz saw satire of this caliber should only be taken by prescription. However, if that were so, then the black market would inevitably be flooded by cheap knock-off copies. I would urge that you not be swayed by cheap imitators - demand the original! Take Negrophobia only as directed – TAKE IT ALL AT ONCE, in one sitting! Take it with a grain of salt, a pile ‘o Aunt Jemima flapjacks, and heaping helpings of K-Y jelly. Remember - stale paradigms are best left behind, and children have nightmares to wake up.
December 19, 2019
Holy moley. My bookstore co-worker called this something like a Boschian hellscape of racist iconography. That's pretty much it, I think. This takes a strong heart/brain/stomach, but wrapped up inside all the horrible racial tropes and x-rated antics is a really smart satire, and a powerful if twisted mirror on the most uncomfortable parts of Black/White relations in America.
September 3, 2009
uncomfortable. in your face. outrageous. gutsy.
October 23, 2016
I've never been so uncomfortable and gleefully intrigued by a novel before.
September 25, 2019
The single longest and most consistent "Fuck you" to the reader ever written.
Tenouttaten.
Tenouttaten.
August 18, 2024
Yesterday I was a person who had never read negrophobia, and now I will always be a person who has read this book. This book (really a screenplay) follows a privileged white girl, Bubbles, who is cursed by her family’s black maid to fall into a nightmare of her own racist subconscious. It’s a satire that goes to some wild and disgusting places. I basically had to crush it in one sitting because I knew I would never pick it up again if I put it down. In the preface, Darius James says he wants to make you throw up, he hopes he gives you nightmares.
Compare this book to: American Psycho, Sorry to Bother You, Naked Lunch, Spike Lee’s Bamboozled
"Nowhere is it written Black people cannot take back the images of racism and use them as a weapon against those who oppress them. Racism is the madness of the Other and has nothing to do with how one chooses to define one's self. Racism is a form of the Evil Eye... the best protection from the 'evil eye' is laughter."
Compare this book to: American Psycho, Sorry to Bother You, Naked Lunch, Spike Lee’s Bamboozled
"Nowhere is it written Black people cannot take back the images of racism and use them as a weapon against those who oppress them. Racism is the madness of the Other and has nothing to do with how one chooses to define one's self. Racism is a form of the Evil Eye... the best protection from the 'evil eye' is laughter."
January 4, 2021
In a recent anti black racism presentation and discussion at work we examined our privilege and talked about actions we might be able to take as individuals to move forward in our own ways. Leaving the discussion we were challenged to read White Fragility by Robin DiAngela. It was explained that it was a great book looking at the institutionalization of racism, written by DiAngela who is a white woman. I must say in that moment I was shocked to hear this qualification meant to rationalize the book for me, that I should examine racism from the perspective of someone who was white. What was going on? - Now, White Fragility may be great, it may be flawed, its effects might forgive those flaws. I don’t know. I haven’t read it. - I thought of my reading of Ishmael Reed and wondered if I could find something that would strike me as a little more hard hitting, perhaps slap me in the face a bit. I wondered if despite the sobering title would White Fragility somehow pat me on the back and make me feel better? Somehow it just didn’t sound right. Enter Negrophobia, which Darius James wrote after discovering that his girlfriend’s mom was racist. I can now laugh at my sense of reporterly desire to find a grittier story. Do you want that? Well this book throws you into a sexualized race war where institutionalized black racism, white power and genocide are met with voodoo, whit and violence. This is all written up in an avant-garde script form meant by James to make you want to throw up. Think of the aforementioned Ishmael Reed married with Kathy Acker or even Carleton Mellick III (just google his titles). So no, I definitely wasn’t disappointed. Avant-garde is a great vehicle to wake you up once in a while.
January 29, 2019
If you were to fall out of bed in 2019, you would wake up into a world that is not ready for Darius James’s Negrophobia, copyright 1992. A novel of blacks and whites divided, presented in the form of a demented movie script, Negrophobia’s phantasmagorical, stank-ass, slime-coated, sex-drenched assault on all things high, pale-faced and droll in America is just too harsh, too visceral, too reveling in taboo stereotype for ready digestion by the rarefied present-day evolution of the literary species. Well, faint-guts, coat that stomach with something to soak up the acidic bite back. Jokes on you: A fresh paperback edition of Negrophobia, with a fresh preface by the author, will be available from NYRB Classics on February 19, 2019. There may be no other book that 2019 America is more in need of—ready or not.
April 8, 2011
A mostly senseless, rambling novel which makes its point early on and then beats you over the head with it. Reading like a cross between "Naked Lunch" and "Alice in Wonderland," the novel consists entirely of a series of hallucinatory scenes.
January 27, 2008
This book is one of my all time favorite things to read. Pure genius. If you don't "get" it you won't get me....
February 2, 2008
Hee-lar-it-teee!!!
April 18, 2020
This book knows a vanishing truth: satire isn’t supposed to be defanged, it should leave a mark when it bites down.
January 4, 2023
Shelby says “your recent goodreads reviews have a very profesh overtone, brava,” so now I feel pressured. This was recommended by her so double pressure. Overall, pretty good. Experience somewhat tempered by the foreword and preface. I’m slightly worried that being told this book and its author are cool so many times in a row colored my opinion. I thought it was cool, but how can I be sure now? As with most books about racism I’m left with a kind of directionless guilt.
February 9, 2025
This book is repulsive, repugnant, and irreverent…and I kind of loved it! Who knew that a book filled with offensive, grotesque depictions of the antiblack images and tropes that have permeated our culture would be the salve I needed for a heart broken by this current political moment and the hundreds of years of history that has led to it. A satire, this book pushes to its fever dream extremes the idea that the racist ideas that have fashioned our society and woven themselves into our most beloved political and cultural institutions are the results of a mental ailment that distorts the reality of its proponents and ultimately drives them mad.
Do not read if you are not able to engage with trigger-warning laden satire. The author intends to get in your face with his violent, sexually explicit, and highly offensive imagery. But if you can make it through that, you’ll be treated to a quirky, disgusting, and laugh-out-loud hilarious work of art that will highlight the utter nonsense and certifiable insanity at the heart of racist beliefs that seek to dehumanize Black people.
Do not read if you are not able to engage with trigger-warning laden satire. The author intends to get in your face with his violent, sexually explicit, and highly offensive imagery. But if you can make it through that, you’ll be treated to a quirky, disgusting, and laugh-out-loud hilarious work of art that will highlight the utter nonsense and certifiable insanity at the heart of racist beliefs that seek to dehumanize Black people.
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March 28, 2021no idea how i could possibly review this but i went from laughing to feeling genuinely, coldly, terrified in a way nothing else has ever scared me. a genuine full-blown nightmare of a book. everything about this is wild and uncomfortable - the author's paypal is in the introduction.
February 16, 2025
Feels kinda like a screenplay for a 90s adaptation of Alice in Wonderland penned by Melvin Van Peebles for MTV that remained unproduced because it was immediately locked away in a vault somewhere.
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August 10, 2025jesus christ
May 22, 2020
Takes the form of a screenplay in a "mash-up" style. Kind of reminiscent of William Burroughs. Turns racial stereotypes on their heads with its powerful perspective on the absurdities we create in our own minds based on our own insecurities, biases and misunderstandings.
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