Jesus and Postsoul Satire on the Small Screen

This essay explores how Aaron McGruder’s television show Black Jesus uses satire to critique constructions of race and religion in twenty-first-century America. It begins with an overview of representations of Jesus in popular media, highlighting both the dominant convention of depicting Jesus as white and the increasing racial diversity of representations in pop culture artifacts. The essay suggests that McGruder’s show is best understood as an example of postsoul satire, that is, forms of comedy produced by African American humorists that target stereotypes within black culture as well as the persistence of white racism. To support this claim, the essay discusses how the show’s humor satirizes white-dominated society, including representations of a white Jesus, as well as the ideals of black masculinity expressed in hip-hop culture and gangsta rap. The essay concludes by situating McGruder’s satire in the context of antiracist work by Black Lives Matter activists.

Pit Bulls and Dogfighting as Symbols of Masculinity in Hip Hop Culture

This article explores the aesthetic and cultural connections between the hyper-masculinization inherent to hip hop culture (and particularly to gangsta rap), the pit bull dog breed, and dogfighting. Building on recent scholarship that has identified the racial and racist assumptions underlying the pit bull controversy, I provide further evidence and arguments on how the highly racialized and genderized hip hop discourses inoculate the pit bull body and suffuse it with multiple meanings reminiscent of America’s traumatic encounter with otherness. As a palimpsest that attests to both mainstream and countercultural explorations of racialized masculinities, the pit bull body is made to “perform” its role as both an agent and a victim within the nation’s compulsive need to control and monitor the “other.”

For Those in the “Ghetto Torture Chambers”

This chapter explores the connective tissue that joins the urban noir tradition to the representations of antiheros that populate Iceberg Slim’s texts and many hip hop narratives. Specifically, it analyzes Slim’s construction of realness in his writings and his 1976 album Reflections in order to understand how his work shapes a notion of “pulp authenticity” that would come to influence gangsta rap. Slim and his hip hop progeny arose from the noir tradition, a literary genre that confronted anxieties of race and gender identity amid an ever-changing urban landscape. Pulp authenticity incorporates the sensational on one hand and varying forms of genuineness on the other, appearing in African American noir cultural productions in the latter part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. At its core, pulp authenticity funnels “genuineness” through a genre that privileges the sensational.