Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Danielle Fuentes Morgan
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Ethical Behavior ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
First Century ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Twenty First Century

The introduction offers historical and twenty-first-century context for African American satire and comedy and explains that the diverse generic forms of these satirical readings disrupt our expectations of discrete boundaries between staged performance and lived experience. The contemporary pervasiveness of satire is related to its ability to shape and reshape an understanding of Black identity. Satire in the twenty-first century moves ethics away from theoretical concepts of right and wrong to consider what ethical behavior might look like in practice and how this could impact Black identity and the possibility for racial justice.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 151-164
Author(s):  
Danielle Fuentes Morgan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
First Century ◽  
Saturday Night ◽  
Stand Up Comedy ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Saturday Night Live ◽  
Opening Up

The book concludes with Dave Chappelle and his return to the stand-up comedy stage and Saturday Night Live. It examines a burgeoning sense of African American satire in the twenty-first century as focused not necessarily on inspiring easy laughter but instead on opening up space for Black selfhood. A post-“post-racial” United States demands that our satirists offer productive ways to express Black identity in a world that seems increasingly self-satirizing. This conclusion underscores the idea of kaleidoscopic Blackness and the variety of valid ways of autonomously choosing to express Black identity in the twenty-first century.

Laughing to Keep from Dying

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Fuentes Morgan
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
First Century ◽  
Interior Space ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Social Sphere ◽  
Traditional Sense ◽  
Twenty First Century

This book utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to expand the parameters of satire to include the satirization found in twenty-first-century African American forms of expression crossing generic boundaries. While many of these texts and performances are satires or comedies in a traditional sense, some offer the satirization of race itself as a strategy to create space for possible satiric readings. The use of comedy, humor, and satire in these texts and performances incisively problematizes the existing social sphere by highlighting its absurdity in both the reality of racialization and the mythology of the “post-racial.” These texts reveal the irrationality of racialization and critique anxieties surrounding race and Blackness to demonstrate the usefulness of satire as a critical frame for articulating Black selfhood. Here the power of satire is found in “laughing to keep from dying,” a form of revolutionary laughter in two registers. The in-group laughter opens up Black interior space to make room for autonomous Black identity formation. Out-group laughter either indicts the listener or offers protective plausible deniability of “just jokes” in which comedy is feigned to lack sociopolitical meaning. This laughter opens up space for kaleidoscopic Blackness, where all autonomous performances of Black self-identity are valid.

scholarly journals “Obligations to Negroes who would be kin if they were not Negro”

Daedalus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 140 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-153
Author(s):  
Werner Sollors
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
African American ◽  
First Century ◽  
Half Century ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
American Authors

The 1965/1966 Dcedalus issues on “The Negro American” reveal how America's racial future was imagined nearly a half-century ago, and at least one of the prophecies - voiced by sociologist Everett C. Hughes - found its fulfillment in an unexpected way at President Obama's inauguration in 2009. Short stories by Amina Gautier (“Been Meaning to Say” and “Pan is Dead”), Heidi Durrow's novel The Girl WhoFellfrom the Sky, plays by Thomas Bradshaw (Strom Thurmond Is Not a Racist and Cleansed), and poems by Terrance Hayes (“For Brothers and the Dragon” and “The Avocado”) suggest trends in recent works by African American authors who began their publishing careers in the twenty-first century.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Tyrone McKinley Freeman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
First Century ◽  
Voluntary Action ◽  
American Life ◽  
Intellectual Inquiry ◽  
Historical Importance ◽  
Twenty First Century

The conclusion brings together the lessons and insights provided by examining Walker’s philanthropic life. After summarizing the origins, evolution, and character of Madam Walker’s gospel of giving, it underscores the historical importance of black women’s philanthropy in undermining and resisting Jim Crow and its enduring role in ultimately dismantling the institution. Further, it suggests an approach to theorizing black women’s generosity as being based on five characteristics: proximity, “resourcefull-ness,” collaboration, incrementalism, and joy. It also affirms philanthropy as a powerful interpretive and analytical lens through which to examine African American life in general and black women in particular. It urges collaboration between scholars interested in philanthropy and black women to mutually strengthen intellectual inquiry and understanding of who counts as a philanthropist and what counts as philanthropic giving. It contends that Walker’s gospel of giving is more accessible as a model of generosity than the prevailing examples offered by today’s wealthiest 1 percent. It is certainly the direct inheritance of African Americans today, but relevant to all Americans, regardless of race, class or gender, interested in taking voluntary action in the twenty-first century.

Religion, Place, and Mountaintop Removal

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph D. Witt
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Strip Mining ◽  
Appalachian Studies ◽  
Mountaintop Removal ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Critical Regionalism ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Twenty First Century

This chapter examines the historical development of anti-mountaintop removal activism in Appalachia in the early twenty-first century. The chapter first examines how twenty-first-century groups such as Mountain Justice emerged out of decades of localized activism against strip mining in the area. It then outlines the theoretical influences from Appalachian studies and religious studies that have shaped this discussion of religion and place in Appalachia, including studies of Appalachian history and development, critical regionalism, and approaches to “lived religion.” Based on these theoretical concepts, the remainder of the book explores multiple religious threads in the re-imagining of Appalachian place by anti-mountaintop removal activists in light of a physically transformed topography.

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