Satire is hard. As a genre that hinges on the hazy boundary between the literal and the figurative, it is vulnerable to distortion and misunderstanding. To master this particularly unforgiving…
Archive for June, 2021
A Fugitive Strain: Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist and the Joke of Race
Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist stages a confrontation. A noir detective novel backlit by the subtle irony of postmodern knowingness, the enigmatic debut of its now doubly-Pulitzered author seeds its mysteries…
Black Millennial Satire
Over the last few years, Black Millennials have taken African American satire in a fresh new direction. Against early comedies that played to respectability politics, and under the influence of…
Awkward Prose and Satirical Didacticism
“At only eleven years of age, I was a cyber ho.” So begins Issa Rae’s memoir, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl. Her opening line immediately confronts readers with awkwardness,…
Introduction: Twenty-First-Century African American Satire
Tiffany Haddish laughs to keep from crying and, in many cases, to keep from dying: both literal, physical death and the spiritual death that comes with a denial of selfhood….
