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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 uses Lee’s film The Big Boss (1971) to examine the theme of ethnic conflict and solidarity within and between ethnic groups in Paul Beatty’s novel, White Boy Shuffle and The Matrix film trilogy. Just as The Big Boss explores inter- and intra-ethnic conflict, Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle interrogates both ethnicity and national identity against the backdrop of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. While Beatty’s novel echoes the complex examination of dynamics between ethnic groups found in The Big Boss, The Matrix trilogy adds an element of gender cooperation to the consideration of interethnic conflict.

This chapter provides a reading of Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle and Aaron McGruder’s animated television series The Boondocks in order to explore the satirizing of leadership in the African American community. This chapter posits that a lack of hero figures allows for the satirizing of Martin Luther King, Jr. These texts, and the lack of leadership they portray, highlight the gap between the desire for racial harmony and the complexity of the contemporary African American experience.

While civility is traditionally defined as the civic virtues, community-building, and deliberative practices of good citizens, the novel The White Boy Shuffle exposes civil racism in the US public educational system through its equating civility with meritocracy: those deemed meritorious are those with the most civic virtue.

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 21^st 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 21^st 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.

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.

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.

This chapter presents how curiosity, manifested in particular through parody, weds the conceptual work of contesting charisma to the playful questioning embedded in the formal workings of African American humor. At the turn of the twenty-first century, American popular culture witnessed an explosion of millennial refashionings of spectacular black political leadership, even as postmodern black fiction and film contested the scenario of charismatic black political leadership as the primal and primary mode of political belonging and performance in the post-civil rights black cultural repertoire. The chapter examines Paul Beatty’s novel The White Boy Shuffle and the film Barbershop as revisionist counterstories, whose characters embrace an intuitive way of seeing that grapples with those “phantom subjects” of civil rights protest. These subjects are both the leaders they lack and the players in the drama of black political history that the leadership spectacle necessarily pushes out of sight.