The New Times Book Review called T. Geronimo Johnson’s Welcome to Braggsville “The funniest sendup of identity politics, the academy, and white racial anxiety to hit the scene in years.” It tells the story of four college students – a white-coded activist claiming Native ancestry, a malaysian comedian from San Francisco, a black intellectual from Chicago, and a white boy from Braggsville, Georgia – who travel to Braggsville to stage a performance piece in protest of their annual Civil War reenactment.
Here are five reasons you should read it.
- It’s as funny as it is tragic, and it’s very funny, and very tragic. Kinda like life at the moment.
- You’d like to understand what happened in Charlottesville without watching Vice documentaries that make you want to tear your hair out.
- You love character descriptions that come with a biscuit and fried okra on the side: “Lyle, everyone knew, was stubborn enough to argue with a sign and would just as soon kill himself to avoid caring about another person, an oak toad done up as a bullfrog.”
- Braggsville is perfect satire, an art form increasingly endangered by internet trolling and plain old cynicism, and we need to see it done with love and empathy.
- Appendix I. Part callback, part intention to leave you giggling and thinking at the same time, part glimpse into the author’s mind, “Sexicon (The Glossary for the Rest of Us)” is worth the price of admission all on its own.