Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, by Frank B. Wilderson, III, has won the 2008 American Book Award. The American Book Awards were created to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community. Wilderson was one of only two Americans to work in both above- and underground arms of the African National Congress under apartheid.
Both a fascinating, intimate account of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and a hard, revelatory look at the experiences of Black people combating racism in the U.S., Incognegro deeply upsets what we think we already know or understand about contemporary global politics, here or there, then or now.
While in South Africa, Wilderson worked with the armed wing of the ANC, specifically a group of revolutionaries whose mandate was not only the end of apartheid, but a truly liberated South Africa that placed economic as well as political power in the hands of the people. Even when faced with repression, torture, and imprisonment at the behest of their own government, and strategically dismissed as “terrorists,” these activists put their lives on the line for the rights of Black South Africans.
Wilderson writes like no one else of the contemporary Black experience in America, observing with astonishing candor the limitations of multicultural politics as a framework for understanding anti-black racism; the institutional racism of the academy; the extreme alienation he experienced growing up in a wealthy, all-white Minneapolis enclave.
Gripping, unsettling, and impossible to put down, Incognegro is a literary achievement that introduces a major artistic talent. Wilderson’s wit is smithed for the gallows, and it stands in sharp relief against the horror of aborted justice and genocidal oppression he describes in this haunting and powerful memoir. An instant classic that provides no retreat from its damning indictments, Incognegro is a book for anyone who seeks to better comprehend today’s racial politics, and why this world just might remain anti-black. No matter who runs it.
Frank B. Wilderson, III is the recipient of The Loft-McKnight Award for Best Prose in the State of Minnesota, and The Maya Angelou Award for Best Fiction Portraying the Black Experience in America. He teaches African American studies and drama at the University of California, Irvine.
Source: Frank B. Wilderson, III
Web Site: http://www.incognegro.org/
