Perseus Academic: Incognegro by Frank B. Wilderson, III

[Frank B.] Wilderson [will] become a major American writer. Mark my word. — Ishmael Reed

In 1995, a South African journalist informed Frank B. Wilderson, one of only two American members of the African National Congress (ANC), that President Nelson Mandela considered him a threat to national security. Wilderson was asked to comment. Incognegro is that comment. It is also his response to a question posed five years later by a student in a California university classroom: How come you came back?

Although Wilderson recollects his turbulent life as an expatriate in South Africa during the furious last gasps of apartheid, Incognegro is at heart a quintessentially American story. During South Africa's transition, Wilderson taught at universities in Johannesburg and Soweto by day. By night, he helped the ANC coordinate clandestine propaganda, launch psychological warfare, and more. In his mesmerizing political memoir, Wilderson's lyrical prose flows from his childhood in the white Minneapolis enclave integrated by his family to a rebellious adolescence at the student barricades in Berkeley and under tutelage of the Black Panther Party; from unspeakable dilemmas in the red dust and ruin of South Africa to his return to political battles raging quietly on US campuses and in his intimate life. Readers will find themselves suddenly overtaken by the subtle but resolute force of Wilderson's biting wit, rare vulnerability, and insistence on bearing witness to history no matter the cost.

A literary tour de force sure to spark fierce debate in both America and South Africa, Incognegro retells a story most Americans assume we already know, with a sometimes awful, but ultimately essential clarity about racial politics and our own lives.

Frank B. Wilderson, III is the award-winning author of Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms (Duke UP) and the director of Reparations … Now.

Frank B. Wilderson III is the author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (South End Press) and Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms (Duke University Press), and the director of Reparations…Now, a film in progress. A critically-acclaimed scholar and artist, Wilderson's writing has garnered numerous awards and honors, including the National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Judith Stronach Award for Poetry, the Loft-McKnight Award for Best Prose in the State of Minnesota, the Maya Angelou Award for Best Fiction Portraying the Black Experience in America, the Eisner Prize for Creative Achievement of the Highest Order, the Crothers Short Story Award, and the Jerome Foundation Artists and Writers Award. In 2008, Incognegro won the American Book Award. Wilderson teaches African American studies and drama at the University of California, Irvine.