Blue Mountain Center

In February 2010, Duke University Press will publish Frank Wilderson’s monograph on cinema, politics, and race: Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms.

Frank B. Wilderson III, the award winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, is one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress, and former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe. His captivating memoir received the American Book Award, the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award, the Eisner Prize for Creative Achievement of the Highest Order, and the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship

In the late '80s, Frank Wilderson used his life story to help college students understand South African apartheid, a popular political cause of the day on US campuses. Educated in the hard-knock school of activism amid the Black Panther Party and UC Berkeley's famous student uprisings, Wilderson went on to settle in South Africa; once there, he simultaneously taught university classes and assisted in the African National Congress' revolutionary actions. But years later, he was informed that President Nelson Mandela saw him as "a threat to national security." Wilderson's memoir, Incognegro, builds off the author's complex personal history to reach a nuanced analysis of race and transnationalism.