Post Black Paradoxes: Colorblind Racism And The Real Absurd In Twenty-First Century African American Satire
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Black feminist thought
Colorblindness
Post Black
Satire
Twenty-first century
African American Studies
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Abstract
This dissertation examines the rise of satire within twenty-first century African American literature and culture alongside current debates of post Blackness. My work reveals how African American artists strategically deploy satire as a response to a neoliberal colorblindness that maintains de facto inequalities while presenting a triumphalist narrative of the Civil Rights Movement’s dismantling of Jim Crow. As a Black feminist scholar, I read satire through the lens of intersectionality to contemplate why twenty-first century cultural responses to a political, social, and economic climate of colorblindness necessitate not only a critique of interracial stereotypes of Black identity, but also intraracial ones. The recent innovations of Black novelists, playwrights, and new media producers, I argue, have evolved out of not only Black feminist theory, but also Black women artists’ ability to reflect our absurdly post moment—post-Civil Rights, “post racial,” post Black, post Obama, “post truth.” I contend that satire responds to the paradox of twenty-first century Black individualism and collectivism that arises out of outdated political and cultural methods used to address contemporary issues.
Advisor
Salamishah Tillet