Our topic is inspired by the lack of scholarship analyzing African American satire of the past decade. Many events altered national attitudes about race during that time, including the killing of Trayvon Marin, the rise of #BlackLivesMatter, the end of the Obama presidency, and Donald Trump’s election. Contemporaneously, the landscape of African American satire expanded—and transformed—with new works like Black-ish (2014-), The Sellout (2015), Atlanta (2016-), Get Out (2017), and a host of stand-up specials and web series. Only two book-length studies substantively engage with works of this period. Lisa Guerrero’s Crazy Funny (2019) includes one chapter on Key & Peele and Danielle Fuentes Morgan’s Laughing to Keep from Dying (2020) contains chapters on both Get Out and Atlanta.
Our approach also responds to the maturation of theoretical paradigms like Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism, which call for a more critical articulation of Black satirical critique. Panelists offer new insights about how the recent wave of African American satire makes Black subjectivity, Black resistance, and Black life sensible against a backdrop of anti-Blackness. By showing how satire exposes the absurdities of racial knowledge, the panel also marks the significance of humor in the “Black radical tradition” as theorized by scholars like Fred Moten, Robin Kelley, and Hortense Spillers.
To expand on existing scholarship and to chart new directions for the study of African American satire, panelists examine satirization in four expressive domains: 1) literature, 2) web-streaming specials, 3) Black horror and science-fiction, and 4) biographical film.
Derek C. Maus will begin the panel. His paper, “The Fourth Wave of African American Satire,” describes the intersectional perspective of satirical fiction since 2015. In Maus’s view, this “fourth wave” of African American satire turns away from “post-soul” and “post-black” discourse to foreground race’s intersection with issues of gender and class. His presentation ties this intersectional perspective to the concurrent #BlackLivesMatter movement to chart the processual nature of satirical critique and political struggle, or the ways that historical processes of political struggle inspire satirical critique even as satirization helps to spur collective action.
Terrence T. Tucker’s paper, “Can I Be Funny with All this Rage: Wanda Sykes, Dear White People and Comic Rage in the Age of Trump,” extends this discussion of intersectionality into the Trump presidency. He contends that unyieldingly racist rhetoric, coupled with the onset of the “post-truth era,” made it difficult for conventional satire to serve as an escapist, apolitical haven. Yet, Tucker argues, both the 2017 Netflix adaptation of Justin Simien’s Dear White People and Wanda Sykes’s 2019 Netflix stand-up special Not Normal develop a “comic rage” that juxtaposes the absurdity American “equality” with the continued presence of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy to reject colorblind individualism and articulate a direct, militant critique of American and African American life.
In “The Absurdly Real: Police Abolition in the Satires of Jordan Peele,” Danielle Fuentes Morgan further examines the role of militancy in recent satire. She focuses on the post-Obama satires of Jordan Peele—namely Get Out, Us, and The Twilight Zone—which deliberately name policing as both inherently anti-Black and terroristic. She argues that the excessiveness of Peele’s satirical invective refuses any sympathy audiences might have for policing by insisting that the system’s racist predilections are not incidental but rather by design. Fuentes argues that satire no longer operates as veiled interpretation; rather, it moves to literalism to uncover absurdity in the reality of life itself.
Brittney Edmonds will close the panel. Her paper, “‘With the Right White Man, We Can Do Anything’: The Satirical Impulse in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman,” traces Spike Lee’s strategic use of humor to reveal the boundlessness of white desire for fantasized images of Blackness, but also to counter those desires by inserting a break space, a hold, for Black feeling. Edmonds argues that that, by invoking Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, and a library of blaxploitation films, Lee reckons with the long history of white supremacy and its operation through American cinematic representation. The film’s return to such representations offers occasion to map the affective economies of the racialized image while engaging in the fraught work of anti-racist reimagining.
John Brooks will preside over the panel.