Paul Beatty, the Rhetoric of War, and the Selling Out of Civil Rights

Elizabeth Anker situates Paul Beatty’s The Sellout in a literary tradition that enlists satire as an instrument of critique. Anker demonstrates that Beatty violates race-related taboos in order to confront readers with the avoidances that those taboos impose. Beatty’s biting humor, with its slippage between metaphor and reality, serves to disrupt the self-satisfaction and complacency that mark conventional narratives about the legacy of the Civil War and the civil rights movement in American constitutional politics. The Sellout shows us, in Anker’s view, that the tradition of written constitutionalism and its celebratory symbolism of “quill and ink” has often served instead to enable and legitimize the criminalization and disenfranchisement of African Americans. Moreover, courts have assimilated a racialized language of urban combat—including the so-called wars on poverty, drugs, and crime—that has perpetuated structural racism, reinforcing standards of decorum and good citizenship that have operated as barriers to inclusion in the liberal democratic public sphere.

Post-Black Satire

This chapter collides the idiom of post-blackness with the dominant genre of the neo-slave narrative in contemporary African American literature. This distinct body of work—post-black neo-slave narratives—mines the historical scene of slavery in the mode of satire. Through absurd juxtapositions, surreal analogies, and farcical adventures, post-black satirists expose the contradictions of the insistence on the unending history of slavery amid declarations of a break from previous racial regimes. Viewing satire as the lens through which debates about race and postracialism articulate, the chapter explores how fictions by Paul Beatty and Mat Johnson combat the sentimental template of abolition and neo-abolition by refusing to collapse past and present. The chapter concludes with a look at what might be termed a post-black post-satire, as Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) stretches time and space to transform the slave narrative into a flexible portal to practices of exploitation worldwide.

The Satire of Black Post-Blackness

The fifth chapter argues that feeling “black post-black” is a disorienting situation that lends itself to satire. Crawford analyzes the ways in which satire has begun to define 21st century African American cultural productions as both blackness and whiteness are satirized. The satire of the Black Arts Movement is shown to be much more invested in satirizing whiteness as opposed to the 21st century post-black tendency to foreground the satirizing of blackness. In addition to the analysis of novels, drama, and poetry, this chapter also uncovers the role of satire in editorial cartoons included in Black World, one of the key journals of the Black Arts Movement. This chapter foregrounds the satire of Charles Johnson, Carlene Hatcher Polite, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Percival Everett, Paul Beatty, Mat Johnson, and others.

Dissimulating Blackness: The Degenerative Satires of Paul Beatty and Percival Everett

This chapter provides a reading of three novels – Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle and Slumberland and Percival Everett’s A History of the African American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond as Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid – that engage in degenerative satire, which complicates the mimetic representation of satiric texts. This chapter argues that these novels satirize not only clichéd tropes of blackness but also the presumption that blackness can or should be represented. Ultimately, this chapter shows how these novels destabilize the very notion of blackness.