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A Black Briton's Journey through the American South
University Press of Mississippi
November 2002
On Sale: November 1, 2002
280 pages ISBN: 1578064880 EAN: 9781578064885 Trade Size
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Non-Fiction
In 1997 Gary Younge explored the American South by retracing
the route of the original Freedom Riders of the 1960s. His
road trip was a remarkable socio-cultural adventure for an
outsider. He was British, journalistically curious, and
black. As he traveled by Greyhound bus through the
former Confederate states, he experienced an awakening. He
felt culturally tied to this strange yet familiar place.
Though a Briton by birth and the child of emigrants from
Barbados, he felt culturally alien in his native land. In
Dixie, however, he met African Americans whose racial
distinctiveness was similar to his own. To local blacks he
looked like a brother, while sounding intriguingly foreign.
As he assessed their political rise in the South, he noted
too how African American tradition seemed static and
unchanged. It was a refreshing whiff of "home."
Awakened to his own identity as a black in a predominantly
white society and absorbed by a sense of southern myth and
racial history, he produced this account, a blend of travel
writing, historical research, wit, and social commentary.
His probing examination of the Southland gives fresh
perspective on race relations in America. Originally
published in England, No Place Like Home is "more
than a piece of travel writing," praised the London
Evening Standard, "[but] a compelling exploration of
racial identity and the problems of growing up clever,
black, and angry in small-town Stevenage. . . . Younge is a
fine journalist--thoroughgoing, clear-minded, and
meticulous, and he writes in a measured, lucid prose. . . .
Next, please take a trip around the UK, Gary Younge, and
write about it. Your country needs you." Gary Younge
is a columnist and feature writer for the London
Guardian. In this post he has written extensively from
the United States, South Africa, and Europe. In 1996 he
worked at the Washington Post as recipient of a
Laurence Stern Fellowship.
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