Constructing a Nervous System

The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and acclaimed author of Negroland boldly and brilliantly fuses cultural analysis and memoir to probe race, class, family and art.

Taking in the jazz and blues icons whom Jefferson idolised as a child in the 1950s, ideas of what the female body could be — as incarnated by trailblazing Black dancers and athletes — Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy reimagined in the artworks of Kara Walker, white supremacy in the novels of Willa Cather, and more, this breathtakingly eloquent account is both a critique and a vindication of the constructed self.