Jujitsu for Christ (Banner Books)

Butler, Jack

ISBN 10: 1617037389 / ISBN 13: 9781617037382

Published by University Press of Mississippi, 2013

About this Item

Very Good - Crisp, clean, unread book with some shelfwear/edgewear, may have a remainder mark - NICE PAPERBACK Standard-sized.

Seller Inventory # M1617037389Z2

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Jujitsu for Christ (Banner Books)
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1617037389
• ISBN 13: 9781617037382
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

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 has moved to Jackson from the Delta in hopes of greater opportunity for their children.

As the political heat rises, 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 at the University of Mississippi over James Meredith's admission; the fieldwork of Medgar Evers, the NAACP, and various activist organizations; and the lingering aura of Emmett Till's lynching.

Drawing not only on William Faulkner's gothic-modernist Yoknapatawpha County 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 very funny, 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.

About the Authors

Jack Butler is originally from Alligator, Mississippi, and is author of West of Hollywood: Poems From a Hermitage, Hawk Gumbo and Other Stories, The Kid Who Wanted to Be a Spaceman, Nightshade, Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock, Dreamer: A Novel, and Jack's Skillet: Plain Talk and Some Recipes from a Guy in the Kitchen.

Brannon Costello is associate professor of English at Louisiana State University, editor of Conversations with Michael Chabon and Howard Chaykin: Conversations, and coeditor of Comics and the U.S. South, all published by University Press of Mississippi.