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…
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African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century, Contemporaries Essays
African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century, Contemporaries Essays
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…
African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century, Contemporaries Essays
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,…
African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century, Contemporaries Essays
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….
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Contemporaries Essays, Interpretive Difficulty
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Interpretive Difficulty
Contemporaries Essays, Interpretive Difficulty
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Interpretive Difficulty
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Interpretive Difficulty
Suffer a Sea Change
Into Something Rich and Strange
I am only hounding myself with these questions, trying to work myself up by the silence that is my only answer from all around. How long, I ask myself, will…