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The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster is a 9,000-word essay by Norman Mailer that connects the "psychic havoc" wrought by the Holocaust and atomic bomb to the aftermath of slavery in America in the figuration of the Hipster, or the "white negro".
So there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man’s code to fit their facts. The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.
The White Negro. Norman Mailer. 3.21. 300 ratings30 reviews. An essay that packed an enormous wallop at the time may make some of us cringe today with its hyperbolic dialectics and hyperventilated metaphysics.
In “The White Negro,” Mailer argues that the postwar bleakness of the 1950s saw the appearance of “a phenomenon,” “the American existentialist,” the “hipster.” The hipster had the “life-giving...
The White Negro. essay by Mailer. Learn about this topic in these articles: discussed in biography. In Norman Mailer. …work was a long essay, The White Negro (1957), a sympathetic study of a marginal social type—the “hipster.” Read More. Literature Novels & Short Stories Novelists L-Z. Norman Mailer. American author.
And then Mailer published “The White Negro” in 1957. In these pages, Mailer attempted to define a subculture of American existentialists, whom he termed “hipsters.”. He equated the psychopathic hipster with the everyday Negro, for both, he insisted, existed in a world of danger and violence and war.
In his seminal essay, first published in 1957, Norman Mailer offers an analysis of the hipster, a social phenomenon specific to the United States of the 1920s–50s. Mailer defines hipsters as the young people who have rejected conformity, adopting the African-American culture as their own.
