T. Johnson - Welcome to Braggsville

Pen mawashi—That pen-spinning trick you wish you could do.

Performance—That time you expressed great thanks for the toe socks, lavishly praised a lackluster meal, or thanked your boss for the “feedback.”

Performative intervention—(1) Activism through acting. (2) Acting through activism.

Porque/¿Por qué?—Don’t know a Spanish speaker? Treat this as an invitation to meet one. Say hello to a busboy or a nanny or a Supreme Court Justice.

Reenactment—(1) See reenactor. (2) See Braggsville.

Residual affect—When colonial echoes haunt the station.

Sexicon—(1) A sexy-ass lexicon. (2) The practice of using big words where small would do.

Siddhartha—Like Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga, and Biggie Smalls, Buddha had a birth name.

Slavery—Employment by another name.

Solid CO2—Dry ice. The magic engine of smoke machines. Metalheads, ravers, Wicked fans, salute!

So-Me—Social media.

Split in the bib—If you know what a bib is… and where a bib is worn… and what it covers… join us in this celebration of cleavage!

Suprasemiotic domain—The constellation of meaning-making practices engaged in when people communicate face-to-face, including speech, writing, gesture, and dance. The suprasemiotic domain is the communicative field within which people naturally function. Speech is more than words. Body talk.

University—(1) Colonialism’s most exquisite distillation. (2) The birthplace of spring break.

Uppity-Plessy—Portmanteau combining uppity and Homer Plessy, the plaintiff in the United States Supreme Court decision that upheld the states’ rights to segregate under the doctrine “separate but equal.”

U.S. of A. — See Braggsville.

Veil of Ignorance—The golden rule gussied up as a fancy theory.

Wormhole—(1) A shortcut through the space-time of virginity, the journey through which leaves the driver exalted and vehicle undefiled. (2) The dirty virgin superhighway.

Works Cited

Adorno, T. (1985). On the fetish-character in music and the regression of listening. In A. Arato & E. Gebhardt (Eds.), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (pp. 270–99). New York, NY: Continuum.

Butler, J. (2000). Everything . New York, NY: Various Press.

Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. (S. Rendall, Trans.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

. (1986). Heterologies: Discourse on the Other . (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

. (1988). The Writing of History . (T. Conley, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Cowan, E. R. (2015). 16 Voices . Atlanta, GA: WXP.

Davenport, D. (2015). Residual affect: Race, micro-aggressions, micro-inequities, (autophagy) & BBQ in the contemporary Southern imagination at Six Flags. In T. G. Johnson (Ed.), Welcome to Braggsville . New York, NY: William Morrow.

De Haan, F. (1999). Evidentiality and epistemic modality: Setting boundaries. Southwest Journal of Linguistics, 18, 83–101.

Fairclough, N. (2001). Language and Power. (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Griffin, R. (2009). Fundamentals of Management . Mason, OH: Cengage Learning.

Johnson, T. G. (2010). Birth of a notion (From the great divide to the digital divide: Consilience in literacy studies during the age of the supra-semiotic domain). Unpublished MA thesis, UC Berkeley.

. (2011). Death of the straight man: New media literacies, aesthetic education and ambiguity in the ironic age. Unpublished proposal, UC Berkeley.

. (2012). Hold It ’Til It Hurts . Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press.

. (2015). Welcome to Braggsville . New York, NY: William Morrow.

Mahiri, J. (Forthcoming). Deconstructing race: Micro-cultures shifting the multicultural paradigm.

Ochs, E. (1996). Linguistic resources for socializing humanity. In J. J. Gumperz and S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (pp. 407–37). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Old Hitch (1825–1999). Cooking by Heartlight . Braggsville, GA: Handheld.

Welcome to Braggsville, aka Braggsville, aka BRAGGZ, aka B-Ville, aka WTB is indebted to many a literary Sherpa: Eleanor “I’ll Be the Judge of What’s Hard to Sell” Jackson, aka agent extraordinaire, who found a home for “this peculiar little book that I can’t quite describe”; Jessica “Make Them Say No” Williams, editor deluxe at William Morrow and sister by another mister; Katy “Clear-Eyed” Whitehead at HarperCollins UK/4th Estate; Jaimy “Libretto” Gordon; Sam “The Architect” Chang, quiet revolutionary; Connie “The Guru” Brothers; Karen “The Linguistinator” Russell; and Wiley “First Responder” Cash; and early readers Kate “Volte-Face” Sachs, Richard “Scorpio Rising” Katrovas, Jennifer “Mixmaster” Dubois, and Shane “Reed” Book.

Without saying — well, almost but not quite: U. C. “Fiat Lux” Berkeley; that beautiful woman who looks good in everything she wears; the Braggsville novel commission; LaCherriere, French polyglot factory; Vltava, both minor planet and river; Sheryl “Town Crier” Johnston; Saturn; Kelly “Eagle Eye” Farber; the tribe at HarperCollins/William Morrow, most notably Team BRAGGZ — Candice Carty-Williams, Mandy Kain, Lynn Grady, Kaitlin Harri, Jennifer Hart, Doug Jones, Morwenna Loughman, Tobly McSmith, Jonathan Pelham, Mary Ann Petyak, Clare Reihill, Kelly Rudolph, Liate Stehlik, Mary Beth Thomas; and the home teams at Iowa y WMU y OSUC y Berzerkeley y Atl y Nola.

And of course: my mom, Irene “The Matron Saint” English-Johnson; my dad, Tyrone “Esquire” Johnson; my sister, Ingrid “A Cappella Queen” Johnson-Lucuron; mon beau friere, Pierre “Waffle House” Johnson-Lucuron; the neph, Little Geronimo, for being a model of tenacity; Elizabeth “Tour de France” Cowan; and the old school ATL krewe (Click, Costarides, Dixon, Hazim, Mclean, O’Ree, Prieto, Price, Wages). Masquerades! Know that your contribution is not forgotten, even if you are not listed here.

About the Civil War, Sigmund Freud, Ishi, and “protecting and serving,” there is little left to say, except that half a haircut is no haircut at all.

Photo by Elizabeth R. Cowan

BORN AND RAISED in New Orleans, T. GERONIMO JOHNSONreceived his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and his M.A. in language, literacy, and culture from UC Berkeley. He has taught writing and held fellowships — including a Stegner Fellowship and an Iowa Arts Fellowship — at Arizona State University, the University of Iowa, UC Berkeley, Western Michigan University, and Stanford. Johnson is also a curriculum designer for Bay Area nonprofits and the director of the UC Berkeley Summer Creative Writing Program. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Best New American Voices, Indiana Review, the Los Angeles Review, and Illuminations, among others. His first novel, Hold It ’Til It Hurts, was a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Johnson is currently a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives in Berkeley, California.