WHAT’S SO FUNNY?: SATIRE AND AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Danielle Fuentes Morgan May 2016 © 2016 Danielle Fuentes Morgan WHAT’S SO FUNNY?: SATIRE AND AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Danielle Fuentes Morgan, Ph. D. Cornell University 2016 This dissertation analyzes the use of satire in African American literature and culture in forming a new understanding of racialization in the 1980s through the 2010s. This “post-soul” moment, defined by authors who came of age post-Civil Rights Movement, in particular necessitates humor and the satirical as it opens up a space for play to accentuate the inherent instability and absurdity in racial categorization. By placing in conversation texts and performers as diverse as Jourdan Anderson’s “To My Old Master;” damali ayo’s How to Rent a Negro; Adam Mansbach’s Angry Black White Boy; Percival Everett’s Erasure; Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark; Mat Johnson’s Incognegro and Loving Day; Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, and Leslie Jones, it becomes possible to document the insistent satirical inclination in African American literature and to examine its trajectory from the 19th century to the 21st century. The historical trajectory of satire within African American literary resistance calls for a shift in an understanding of humor as potentially frivolous and stress that the political and social import of African American humor must not be disassociated from the laughter it inspires today. By reading these satirical texts in the contexts of historicity, postmodernism, and African American literary theory, it becomes possible and necessary to examine the evolution of African American humor as the position of African Americans to power shifts and simultaneously remains the same and as depictions of race and its significance have changed with the intent of the portrayals. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH In 2005, Danielle Fuentes Morgan received her B.A. in English with a minor in African American studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She completed her M.A.T., with a specialization in secondary English education, at Duke University in 2006 and taught high school English and African American studies for three years before returning to school and earning her M.A. in English from North Carolina State University in 2011. She completed her Ph.D. in English at Cornell University in 2016. In 2014, she received an American Studies Research Grant that allowed her to do archival research at the Schomburg Center in Harlem, New York. In 2015, she was awarded the Deanne Gebell Gitner ’66 and Family Annual Award for Teaching Assistants. She is also a Bouchet Scholar in the Cornell University chapter of the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society. Her writing has been published on Racialicious and an abbreviated, early version of the second chapter of this dissertation can be found in Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights. She hails from Durham, North Carolina. iii For the three who are watching me from heaven: my uncle, Kevin McMillan, who taught me that comedy matters; my grandpa, H. Calvin McMillan, who daily reminded me to remember whose blood cruises through my veins; and my grandma, Ann McMillan, who wanted to live to see what I would become. I hope I make you proud. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We often think of writing as a purely isolated endeavor, yet I owe an immense debt of gratitude to so many people in the completion of this dissertation. First, I must thank my parents, Philip and Angela Cousin, for their unfailing encouragement. Their faith was frequently infuriating because it was so steadfast and unwavering, but it was so necessary and buoyed me when my energy and self-confidence flagged. Thank you for believing in me first, and for believing in me always. I want to thank my daughter, Calliope Angela Morgan, my Callie, more than I can articulate. Her patience and love are undeserved and humbling. She is my muse and my inspiration. I am thankful for my favorite editor, my husband, Matt Morgan, who always took the time to read my writing and offer feedback. I am eternally grateful for your support, your intellectual insights, and our shared love of comedy: you are “best of husbands and best of men.” I also thank my brothers, Carlos Fuentes and Joshua Cousin, for their thoughtful suggestions and consistent encouragement—and the joyful distractions they happily facilitated over the holidays. Thanks likewise to my “sister from another mister,” Bethann Cleary, for her support, her compassion, her opinions, and for the space to share righteous indignation over the same social issues. The faculty and staff at Cornell University have been a blessing, and my committee has been particularly inspiring. They are great scholars, great teachers, and—perhaps rarest and most valuable—great people. My chair, Margo Crawford, has been an incredible mentor, teacher, and friend over the past five years. The encouragement and insights she offered first in her class, “Black Aesthetics Unbound,” served as catalyst for this dissertation. She opened my eyes to new ways of thinking about postmodernism and blackness and I am grateful that she shared her brilliance and innovative scholarship with me. I always left her office feeling excited by new v “post-soul” possibilities and encouraged that there really might be a place for me in the academy. Dagmawi Woubshet’s kindness and writing acumen inspired me to find my own writerly voice and remind me still that there is space for the work you love in academia as well as in the broader public—and if there isn’t, you must create the space; I am thankful for his encouraging both a closer walk with James Baldwin and a theoretical apparatus that privileges the margins without hesitation or shame. Conversations with George Hutchinson on potential historical contexts and his incisive comments as I began to shape the historical framework of this dissertation were extraordinarily helpful; his advice was invaluable in shaping my understanding of how the past informs the present. I am thankful for his support, his genuine interest, and the very necessary pushback he offered in considering the union of methodology and message. Riché Richardson encouraged me with such care to pursue the work that matters most to me, and I am thankful for that valuable recommendation as I completed this work. Her astounding breadth of knowledge was crucial in first thinking about primary and secondary sources and the trajectory of African American humor and particularly the role of women in humor studies; she sets an admirable and high standard as both a scholar and an instructor, and I am thankful for the lessons learned under her guidance. I am also immensely grateful to Jeremy Braddock and Elisha Cohn for their support and interest in my scholarship as well as for offering feedback on my abstract at the outset. I am thankful to the American Studies Research Grant for funding my archival research at the Schomburg Center in Harlem, and the Knight Institute for allowing me the pleasure of teaching a course on African American comedy. My sincere gratitude to my home away from home, the Africana Studies and Research Center, and the staff—especially for the warmth and dedication of Eric Kofi Acree, Saah Nue Quigee, and Sarah Powers. When I approached their desk to check vi out materials, they often had suggestions that became unexpected and indispensible additions to my research and even new books for Callie’s enjoyment and education. I am thankful for the members of my cohort—Nancy Quintanilla, Ruoji Tang, Michaela Brangan, Kaylin O’Dell, Alex Harmon, David Aichenbaum, Claire Whitenack, Molly Katz, Emily Rials, and Lena Krian—for helping me keep the work/play balance (and for pie!) and for the genuine good cheer with which we rooted for each other. I am also thankful for Danielle Haque, Anisha Warner, Xine Yao, Brant Torres, Nici Bragg, Shyla Foster, and Jill Spivey Caddell for setting such a high bar and helping me to navigate the nuances of the university. Similarly, I am immensely grateful to the members of my dissertation writing group—Nancy Quintanilla, Lacie Rae Cunningham, Esmeralda Arrizon-Palomera, and Honey Crawford—for camaraderie, for the implementation of loose deadlines, for noticing intersections I did not, and for the many occasions for food, drink, and fellowship. I also cannot express how thankful I am to Holley Mitchell and her family for their support and for the love they offered to my family and especially to Callie. Outside of Cornell, I want to thank Derek Maus and James Donahue at SUNY-Potsdam for publishing a portion of my dissertation in Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights, and for their encouragement as I began my academic career. Immense gratitude to Adam Mansbach for talking to me over the phone while I nervously stammered out questions about racial performance, hip hop, and Angry Black White Boy. I am grateful to Sheila Smith McKoy and Jason Miller at North Carolina State University for their support throughout the years and for introducing me to Erasure and the story of Langston Hughes on Franklin Street, respectively. Thanks to Brett Schenker for his quick replies and willingness to speak on the nuances of race and comic books. Finally, thanks to my dog, Moxie, for the support only a dog can