Negrophobia An Urban Parable

A provocative, raucous dark comedy about race and racism in America, now back in print after twenty-five years and with a new preface by the author.

Darius James’s scabrous, unapologetically raunchy, truly hilarious, and deeply scary Negrophobia is a wild-eyed reckoning with the mutating insanity 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.

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.