Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature
- The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Histories of the Present
- Part II African American Genres
- 4 Afrofuturism and the Speculative Turn
- 5 The Black Lyric
- 6 Neo-Slave Imaginaries
- 7 Incarceration and Confinement Literature
- 8 Satire, Comedy, and Critique
- 9 Popular Romance and Literary Undergrounds
- Part III Mapping New Identities and Geographies
- Part IV Critical Approaches
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
8 - Satire, Comedy, and Critique
from Part II - African American Genres
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 December 2023
- The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature
- The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Histories of the Present
- Part II African American Genres
- 4 Afrofuturism and the Speculative Turn
- 5 The Black Lyric
- 6 Neo-Slave Imaginaries
- 7 Incarceration and Confinement Literature
- 8 Satire, Comedy, and Critique
- 9 Popular Romance and Literary Undergrounds
- Part III Mapping New Identities and Geographies
- Part IV Critical Approaches
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Summary
In the five decades since the publication of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), the satirical mode of discourse has arguably been more prominent in American popular culture than at any point in the nation’s history. Although the 1960s produced innumerable exemplary satires in various genres, the subsequent decades feature an even greater density of significant works that express political, social, and cultural criticisms through the absurdism, parody, polyvocality, and other distinctive characteristics of the satirical mode. Mumbo Jumbo both indicates and accelerates the predominance of what Steven Weisenburger identifies as a "degenerative" satirical mode that fundamentally reorients the nature of both American literature generally and African American literature specifically. Contemporary African American satire remains a literature of dissent, even though it seemingly bears scant relation to either midcentury “protest novels” or the wide range of “uplift” narratives common to both the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. In the hands of African American authors, degenerative satire is intensely skeptical of a wide range of ideologies that have contributed to the construction, representation, and (de)valuation of blackness as both an individual and collective identity in the contemporary United States.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023