KAY: So let’s talk about “The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica.” Mayer’s poem first appeared in her 1976 book Poetry, originally published by the Kulchur Foundation, available for download…
Contemporaries Essays
Stick to the Script?! No, Stick It to the Man!
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…
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….
Introduction to the Interpretive Difficulty Cluster:
What to Know
Know that the essays were difficult for their authors to write. You’ll see discussion of their struggles writing the essays in the essays themselves. Maybe this should have been expected…
Pessoa and Other Coincidences
Johanna Winant
For Inscrutability
On the day of his suicide, Quentin Compson comes across a little girl in a bakery.1 She silently watches as he buys her bread and buns from a shopkeeper who…
The Lucid Stillness of His Style
The patient who begins a therapy session by naming the topic they refuse to discuss will wind up talking about that very subject before the fifty minutes is up. This…