Bulletproof Diva

Lisa Jones brings the wit and candor of her infamous Village Voice column to a much larger audience. This provocative collection of essays and observations covers a wide range of topics, many of them controversial. Jones moves smoothly from issues of ethnicity in a changing America to "butt-theory" and the roller-coaster politics of black hair.

In Bulletproof Diva, Lisa  Jones brings the wit and candor of her infamous  Village Voice column, "Skin Trade,"  to a much larger audience. Chock full of the  "fierce black girl humor" that has made her  column so popular, this provocative collection of  essays and observations on race, sex, identity, and  the politics of style speaks to a young generation  of blacks who were raised in an integrated society  and are now waiting for America to deliver on its  promises of equality. The thirty-seven short  pieces and six long essays in Bulletproof  Diva cover a wide range of topics, many of them  extremely controversial. Jones moves smoothly from  issues of ethnicity in a changing America,  challenging viewpoints on African-American  and mixed race identity, to "butt theory"  and the roller-coaster politics of black hair.  Written in a style that is as appealing as it is  unapologetic, Bulletproof Diva  marks the debut of a genuinely gifted young writer  with a distinctive voice and a fresh perspective on  the black cultural scene.

Publishers Weekly

``Style is political, of course,'' remarks Jones in one of the essays of this volume; and she proves her point through a series of impressionistic tales of the lives of African American women that demonstrates that the politics of style are linked integrally with the politics of race and gender. ``For black women without access to the room of one's own to make leisure-time art,'' Jones explains, ``our bodies, our style, became the canvas of our cultural yearning.'' Accordingly, the essays, culled mainly from Jones's ``Skin Trade'' column in the Village Voice , uncover layers of signification behind everything from lifestyles to hairstyles--she reads ``the hair trade as American social text.'' The insights yielded by these vignettes are particularly noteworthy because of the gap, explored by Jones adroitly, between the lives, ambitions and desires of the real women she writes of and the reductive, often negative iconography of black women in mainstream American culture. The Bulletproof Diva, a woman who cuts her own trail through the complex terrain of American culture without internalizing the repressive stereotypes this culture offers her as prefabricated forms of self-knowledge, comes to life repeatedly in these pages, yet is all but invisible elsewhere in the American media. Jones argues that it's time we recognize and celebrate her existence. Wickedly witty, savvy and on occasion breathtakingly insightful, these essays turn style into substance. (Apr.)