The Satire of the New Black Renaissance

Open-Source Blackness
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-80308-1
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 176 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 453 g

Reihe: Routledge Studies in African American Literature

How do twenty-first century Black satirists rewrite American ideas of race? This book plunges into the New Black Renaissance – a flowering of the 2000s and 2010s African American culture – and argues that its most potent tool is anti-essentialist satire. The study traces what Baratunde Thurston calls “Open-source Blackness,” an ethos that prizes individuality, inclusivity, and remix.

To map this new terrain, this volume offers close readings of three signature works: Percival Everett’s metafictional Erasure, Justin Simien’s campus satire Dear White People, and Thurston’s own multimedia endeavors – his memoir How to Be Black and the playful software experiments developed under the auspices of his company, Cultivated Wit.

Together, these texts show how literature, film, and technology fracture worn stereotypes and invite broader co-creation of (non-)racial identity. The result is the first sustained academic account of Open-source Blackness – of interest to students and scholars in literary, media, and cultural studies.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Chrzczonowicz, Kamil

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction

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Chapter One: Theory and History

Humor, Race, and Identity in (African) American Culture

Humor, Irony, and Satire in the American Public Sphere

Emotional and Intellectual Dimensions of Black Humor

(Cognitive) Diversity, The Science of Multiple Subjectivities, and Race

The Path to the New Black Renaissance

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Chapter Two: Literature

Anteceding Open-Source Blackness: Erasure (2001) and the Anti-Essentialist Ethos of Percival Everett

The Forceful Racialization of Art

Fighting Against the “Racial Optic”

De-Essentializing Black English

A Need for the Comic Perspective

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Chapter Three: Film

Justin Simien’s Dear White People (2014) and the Introduction of Open-Source Blackness Into Mainstream American Culture

Humor and Irony in Race-Related Campus Activism

Satirical Taxonomy of Racial Micro-Aggressions

Dear White People in the Context of Black American Film and Comic Tradition

Intergroup Contact, Parasocial Relationships, and Race Representation

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Chapter Four: Digital Humanities

Multimedia Satire by Baratunde Thurston

Rewriting Race and Identity Through Humor and Technology

Thurston and Kwame Anthony Appiah: Echoing Scholarship Through Satire

Embodying Multiperspectivity

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Coda

Open-Source Blackness: Redefining African American Identity Through Humor, Culture, And Technology

Über Autor(innen)

Kamil Chrzczonowicz is an Assistant Professor at the Department of North American Cultures and Literatures, Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland. Promoting his fields of study, he co-founded the Humor Lab UW research group, published on the intersections of race and satire in scholarly monographs, and wrote on the comic aspects of literary classics in the UW’s "Masters of American Literature" book series.