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A crucial paradox of racial categories can be identified in Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery, a comic book written by Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece which shows that the color line is both unreal and deadly real, a metaphorical construct with lethal ramifications. By eliminating all color from their book, Johnson and Pleece seem to have intervened in the history of racist representations of African Americans in comics, in addition to destabilizing the white South’s attempts to “read” categories of black and white in the physiognomy of its citizens. This chapter examines narratives of passing and lynching in Incognegro to demonstrate how the comic critiques socially constructed ideas of race during Jim Crow.

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.

This chapter compares two depictions of Harlem, John Killen’s The Cotillion and Mat Johnson’s Hunting in Harlem. The latter novel criticizes the Afrocentric Ideology embraced by the former. Although both novels employ satire as a means of social critique, their comparison demonstrates the change in attitude and ideology of the Post-Soul generation from that embodied by the Civil Rights generation.

In Mat Johnson’s dark satire Hunting in Harlem (2003), black real estate entrepreneurs defend New York’s iconic African-American neighborhood against the impending doom of white gentrification not merely by marketing Harlem’s reclaimed brownstones to a thriving black middle class but also by murdering their less desirable tenants in order to smooth the way as quickly as possible for a new black renaissance. Johnson’s novel explores with at times vicious humor the inter- and intraracial politics of displacement and dissent characteristic of rapid inner-city economic redevelopment as it is heightened by Harlem’s unique cultural status. This chapter considers the ways Hunting in Harlem intervenes in contemporary debates over race and redevelopment, including not only the physical and ethical landscape of gentrification but also the representational terrain of black cultural production itself.

This chapter discusses the power of the medium of comics to shed light on discussions of race, racism, and the act of passing. Glaser moves from a close reading of Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s recent neo-passing narrative, the graphic novel Incognegro (2008), to a wider look at the history of visual media in representing racial violence during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This chapter makes the argument that comics provide an arena for thinking both about how we see and interpret race and how visual depictions of racial violence—from photographs of lynchings to recordings of police shootings of unarmed African American men—force us to grapple with complex ethical questions.

This epilogue argues that feeling black post-black leads Black Arts Movement and 21st century artists to rethink how people live and create home in liminality. Crawford compares the images of home in Mat Johnson’s novel Loving Day and Nikki Giovanni’s poetry volume My House. This epilogue draws upon Nathanial Mackey’s theory of tidalectics (the circular dialectic of black aesthetics). Crawford unveils the love, sense of home, and anticipation that shape the tidalectics of black post-blackness.