‘My sensibility’, she tells us, ‘is a structure of recombinant thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations and words.’ In Constructing a Nervous System, she sets out to break down this sensibility and make it anew to work out when and where her ‘fluencies’ as a critic and a memoirist ‘become clever distractions from what needs writing’. Writer and critic Margo Jefferson is, in the UK at least, best known for Negroland, a memoir considering her own growing up in light of her experiences of race and class in twentieth-century Chicago Constructing a Nervous System advances this project of self-examination, but, as with the earlier book, the real focus isn’t Jefferson herself, but the point of intersection whereby a self, a ‘nervous system’, emerges from a tangle of categories: woman/Black/middle-class.
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