Black Post-Blackness by Crawford Margo Natalie;

Author:Crawford, Margo Natalie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2017-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

5

The Satire of Black Post-Blackness

You’re dealing with a silly man.

—Malcolm X

Satire and what Ralph Ellison described as the “extravagance of laughter” is defining twenty-first-century African American literature and visual art.1 Writers such as Percival Everett, Paul Beatty, Mat Johnson, and Colson Whitehead are producing as much satire and unexpected, blasphemous laughter as visual artists such as Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, Kerry James Marshall, and Mickalene Thomas. But this extravagance of laughter also shaped the Black Arts Movement. The satire of the 1970s second wave of the BAM anticipated much of the satirical play with imagining the unimaginable and unnaming that shapes twenty-first-century black aesthetics. In Laughter: Notes on a Passion (2010), Anca Parvulescu writes, “Laughter is a response to hailing, raising crucial questions about the very notion of response. For what is a response? What does it mean to respond, and especially to respond properly?”2 The response of laughter in the BAM and twenty-first-century black aesthetics is closely tied to the dodging of seemingly inevitable hailing processes that cancel out the sheer pleasure of the simultaneity of feeling black and post-black.

In “The Path Cleared by Amiri Baraka” (2014), Jelani Cobb states, “Reading these lines [from Home, Baraka’s 1966 essay collection] now, in an era defined by a black Presidency, the kill-whitey rhetoric has an almost comic undertone.”3 The “kill-whitey rhetoric” of the BAM was partially comical even during the BAM itself. The satire in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (a text that clings to the BAM without becoming a BAM novel) builds on the satire in many BAM poems and plays. Through the lens of Mumbo Jumbo, we can rediscover the lost, often unrecognized satire in the BAM. After my analysis of Mumbo Jumbo’s connection to BAM satire, I compare Paul Beatty’s twenty-first-century Slumberland, Percival Everett’s twenty-first-century Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, and a range of BAM satire and BAM-inspired satire, as I uncover satire as one of the most expressive forms for the difficult task of making black post-blackness legible.

In Ishmael Reed’s novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972), the narrator describes the movement of Jes Grew, the plague that can upset Western Civilization as it spreads an alternative way of being, a way of dancing and a larger counter-aesthetic that the “Atonists” and the “Wallflower Order” struggle to contain. The character Papa LaBas explains: “Jes Grew which began in New Orleans has reached Chicago. They are calling it a plague when in fact it is an anti-plague. I know what it’s after; it has no definite route yet but the configuration it is forming indicates it will settle in New York. It won’t stop until it cohabits with what it’s after. Then it will be a pandemic and you will really see something. And then they will be finished.”4 Reed never defines Jes Grew as black aesthetics; he leaves it undefined, as if he is suggesting that blackness itself cannot de pinned down. In The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, Henry Louis Gates reminds readers that Mumbo Jumbo

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