Details

ISBN-10: 1617037389
ISBN-13: 9781617037382
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Publish Date: 01/07/2013
Dimensions: 9.00" L, 6.00" W, 0.52" H

Jujitsu for Christ

Afterword by: Brannon Costello

Paperback

Price: $25.00

Overview

Jack Butler’s Jujitsu for Christ-originally published in 1986-follows the adventures of Roger Wing, a white born-again Christian and karate instructor who opens a martial arts studio in downtown Jackson, Mississippi, during the tensest years of the Civil Rights era. Ambivalent about his religion and his region, he befriends the Gandys, an African-American family: parents A.L. and Snower Mae, teenaged son T.J., daughter Eleanor Roosevelt, and youngest son Marcus, who have moved to Jackson from the Delta in hopes of great opportunity for their children. As political tensions mount, Roger and the Gandys find their lives intersecting in unexpected ways. Their often-hilarious interactions are told against the backdrop of Mississippi’s racial trauma-Governor Ross Barnett’s “I Love Mississippi” speech at the 1962 Ole Miss-Kentucky football game in Jackson; the riots that followed at the University of Mississippi, over James Meredith’s admission there; the fieldwork of Medgar Evers, the NAACP, and various activist organizations; the lingering aura of Emmett Till’s lynching. Drawing not only on William Faulkner’s gothic-modernist Yoknapatawpha County fiction but also on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s high-adventure Martian pulps, Jujitsu for Christ powerfully illuminates vexed questions of racial identity and American history, revealing complexities and subtleties too often overlooked. It is a remarkable novel about the civil rights era, and how our memories of that era continue to shape our political landscape and to resonate in contemporary conversations about southern identity. But, mostly, it’s funny as hell, in a mode that’s experimental, playful, sexy, and disturbing all at once. Butler offers a new foreword to the novel. Brannon Costello, a scholar of contemporary southern literature and fan of Butler’s work, writes an afterword that situates the novel in its historical context and in the southern literary canon.

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Reviews

In Larry Brown's novella '92 Days, ' narrator Leon Barlow, when he gets a little cash, goes shopping and buys, among other necessities like coffee and beer, Jujitsu for Christ. What's to say? Even fictional characters buy this masterpiece.

–Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter and Hell at the Breech

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Details

ISBN-10: 1617037389
ISBN-13: 9781617037382
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Publish Date: 01/07/2013
Dimensions: 9.00" L, 6.00" W, 0.52" H
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