Books by Derek C. Maus
Greater Atlanta: Black Satire Since Obama, 2024
This is a draft version of the table of contents and the introduction for a collection of new cri... more This is a draft version of the table of contents and the introduction for a collection of new critical essays about contemporary African American satire that is slated for publication by the University Press of Mississippi in the spring of 2024. The version posted here is NOT finalized and should NOT be cited as being the actual publication.
This updated and revised edition adds to the original version of the text by covering Whitehead's... more This updated and revised edition adds to the original version of the text by covering Whitehead's THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD and THE NICKEL BOYS, as well as incorporating comparative discussion of these more recent works into some of the chapters that discuss his earlier books.
-----> Open-source e-book now available at https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/uscpress_pub/6/. <------... more -----> Open-source e-book now available at https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/uscpress_pub/6/. <------ ///// “Among Jesting in Earnest’ s many strengths is its thorough mastery of the Everett canon and the extensive critical response to it. The book is meticulously well researched in ways that are consistently fair and balanced. Even though Maus engages an unusual number of Everett’s novels and stories, he probes them in finely nuanced detail. Moreover, the book is written in a fluent style which is noteworthy for its clarity and freedom from critical jargon. This is no small task: While relieving the reader in this way, he also does full justice to the intricate theoretical complexities rooted in Everett’s sophisticated training in philosophy.” – Robert Butler, _African American Review_ 53.4 (Winter 2020) ////
“Jesting in Earnest establishes a critical vocabulary that Everett scholars will find invaluable. In specifying Everett as a Menippean satirist, Maus lays an astute and essential foundation for the growing field of study of this important novelist’s work.” — Anthony Stewart, Bucknell University ///// “From the very specific and relevant point of view of Menippean satire, Derek Maus offers a thorough exegesis of Everett’s oeuvre. Taking his cue from Everett’s work Maus destabilizes preconceived ideas to promote genuine reflection.” — Anne-Laure Tissut, Rouen University ///// “Knowledgeable, accessible, and synthetic, Jesting in Earnest is a perfect introduction to Percival Everett’s complex, motley fiction. It convincingly foregrounds Menippean satire as the core subversive mode at the heart of Everett’s project of challenging all linguistic, generic, and ideological assumptions. This first monograph constitutes a tribute worthy of Everett’s remarkable achievement.” — Michel Feith, University of Nantes ///// [What is presented here is both a table of contents for the manuscript and a draft version of the book's introduction. Neither of these should be quoted as consistent with the book version, as both some of the language and the pagination has changed substantially in the final print and e-book versions.]
Part of the long-running "Literary Conversations" series (http://www.upress.state.ms.us/search/se... more Part of the long-running "Literary Conversations" series (http://www.upress.state.ms.us/search/series/5), this volume collects more than twenty published interviews from every stage of Colson Whitehead's publishing career, from just after the apearance of _The Intuitionist_ to the aftermath of winning a passel of major awards for _The Underground Railroad_.
This is a draft of my introduction for the volume. It is NOT the final version of the printed text, nor should it be cited as such.
This is a draft of my editor's foreword for Maurice Kenny's memoir _Angry Rain_, which was publis... more This is a draft of my editor's foreword for Maurice Kenny's memoir _Angry Rain_, which was published by SUNY Press in 2018.The manuscript was complete upon Kenny's death in April 2016 and I performed the editorial work needed to get it into production thereafter. It was a labor of love in many different senses of the word and I am immensely pleased that the book found its way into print after a long journey.
https://wildroadsidedaisies.wordpress.com
Edited by two of Maurice Kenny’s colleagues at SUNY Po... more https://wildroadsidedaisies.wordpress.com
Edited by two of Maurice Kenny’s colleagues at SUNY Potsdam — Derek C. Maus and Donald J. McNutt — and published by Many Moons Press (a literary imprint that Maurice himself started), this anthology includes not only twenty-seven previously unpublished works of poetry, prose, and sketching by Maurice himself, but also dozens more written and visual tributes to Maurice by friends, colleagues, students, and collaborators from throughout his long and storied life.
Includes contributions by Jordan Ricks, Randy Lewis, Anna Neva, Duane Niatum, Béatrice Machet, Stephen Lewandowski, Derek C. Maus, Oscar Sarmiento, gabor g gyukics, Marty Thompson, Neal Burdick, Colin Pope, Ed Kanze, Ethan Shantie, Alex French, Phil Gallos, Lance Henson, Walter Hoelbling, Alan Steinberg, Dennis Maloney, Kayla French, Dan Bodah, Stephanie Coyne DeGhett, Alfred Hoch, Joe Bruchac, John Radigan, Renée Sadhana, Chad Sweeney, and Daniela Gioseffi.
From "30 Americans" to "Angry White Boy," from "Bamboozled" to "The Boondocks," from "Chappelle's... more From "30 Americans" to "Angry White Boy," from "Bamboozled" to "The Boondocks," from "Chappelle's Show" to "The Colored Museum," this collection of twenty-one essays takes an interdisciplinary look at the flowering of satire and its influence in defining new roles in black identity. As a mode of expression for a generation of writers, comedians, cartoonists, musicians, filmmakers, and visual/conceptual artists, satire enables collective questioning of many of the fundamental presumptions about black identity in the wake of the civil rights movement. Whether taking place in popular and controversial television shows, in a provocative series of short internet films, in prize-winning novels and plays, in comic strips, or in conceptual hip hop albums, this satirical impulse has found a receptive audience both within and outside the black community.
Such works have been variously called "post-black," "post-soul," and examples of a "New Black Aesthetic." Whatever the label, this collection bears witness to a noteworthy shift regarding the ways in which African American satirists feel constrained by conventional obligations when treating issues of racial identity, historical memory, and material representation of blackness.
Among the artists examined in this collection are Paul Beatty, Dave Chappelle, Trey Ellis, Percival Everett, Donald Glover (a.k.a. Childish Gambino), Spike Lee, Aaron McGruder, Lynn Nottage, ZZ Packer, Suzan Lori-Parks, Mickalene Thomas, Toure, Kara Walker, and George C. Wolfe. The essays intentionally seek out interconnections among various forms of artistic expression. Contributors look at the ways in which contemporary African American satire engages in a broad ranging critique that exposes fraudulent, outdated, absurd, or otherwise damaging mindsets and behaviors both within and outside the African American community.
Includes essays by Bertram D. Ashe, Thomas R. Britt, Darryl Dickson-Carr, James J. Donahue, Michael B. Gillespie, Gillian Johns, Luvena Kopp, Jennifer Larson, Cameron Leader-Picone, Brandon Manning, Marvin McAllister, Danielle Fuentes Morgan, Derek Conrad Murray, Kinohi Nishikawa, Keenan Norris, Christian Schmidt, Linda Furgerson Selzer, Terrence T. Tucker, Sam Vásquez, and Aimee Zygmonski; with a critical introduction by Derek C. Maus.
---------------------------
Reviews:
"The twenty-one essays that follow coeditor Derek C. Maus’s fine introduction to this tome demonstrate that, while post-soul may be a contentious epithet, the book _Post-Soul Satire_ is a scholarly treasure trove for those interested in the outcropping of satirical African American writing, visual art, music, film, and television that appeared in the twenty-five years following the publication of novelist Trey Ellis’s much discussed article “The New Black Aesthetic” in the Winter 1989 issue of _Callaloo_.[...]
_Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights_ maps the courageous (to some), unsettling (to others) trajectory African American print, dramatic, and visual artists have pursued in the recent past. And given the present-day socioeconomic and political circumstances in America and abroad, it seems clear that African American satirists will have no need to dull, much less put away, their barbed weapons any time soon. Though the task is daunting, our satirists, with Juvenalian scorn and Horatian mockery, will continue to expose societal warts and cancers with the goal of ameliorating broken aspects of America’s social contract, and _Post-Soul Satire_ will provide the rest of us with a powerful framework for better understanding the complex challenges these artists do and will face. This is not merely a good book but an important one."
-- Joe Weixlmann, _African American Review_ 48.1-2 (Spring-Summer 2015)
"In this dexterous, cogent collection, Maus and Donahue (both, SUNY Potsdam) gather 21 scholarly essays that examine the use, effectiveness, and embrace of satire within African American art of the last two decades. Taken together, the essays propose that satirical postures in contemporary black art communicate an imperative among a new generation of black artists to broaden and redefine African American identity in the post–civil rights/Obama (read “post-black”) era. Though complex at times, the critical work accomplished here sustains engagement. The contributors exhibit an admirable command of history, theory, lexicon, and cultural aesthetics. Moreover, the depth and range of analyses encourage exploration of the many primary texts examined in these pages. Particular attention is paid to the works of Kara Walker, Percival Everett, Aaron McGruder, and Touré. Though these offerings—replete with challenging academic language and lofty theorizations—do not lend themselves to readers outside the academy, those interested in thoughtful critiques of popular culture, literature, media studies, and African American studies will find abundant rewards here. Summing Up: Highly recommended."
-- Jarret Neal, _Choice_ 52.8 (April 2015)
"While there are a number of books on the concepts of post-soul and post-racial (many referenced in the book’s nineteen essays), this collection could be an excellent place to begin one’s education on the topic, even given the focus on satire. The range of material and depth of investigation into satiric representations of black subjectivity in a variety of media is impressive. In his introduction to the collection, Derek Maus makes a persuasive case for the strength of an African American brand of satire significant for understanding current comic art in the United States."
-- James E. Caron, _Studies in American Humor_ 2.1 (Jan. 2016)
"Ultimately, this text will be useful to anyone who is particularly interested in satire, its inner workings, and its social and political impact. It is also going to be useful to anyone researching Black humor as well as those working with the complex methods by which some Black Americans negotiate complicated positions in contemporary society. Furthermore, given recent discussions in the public sphere regarding what does and does not count as satire and who should or should not be the targets of satire, the text seems especially relevant."
-- Jacinta Yanders, _Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature_ 45.1 (2017)
"Post-Soul Satire is a well-chosen assortment of essays that discusses African American issues in various media within the cultural context of the United States and in terms of the phenomenon of post-soul[...]. It is an important contribution to American humor studies, given its sustained focus on satire, humor, and irony."
-- Debarati Byabartta, _Studies in American Humor_ 3.2 (2017)
This is the first book-length analysis of Whitehead's body of work, from _The Intuitionist_ throu... more This is the first book-length analysis of Whitehead's body of work, from _The Intuitionist_ through _Zone One_ (alas, it went to press before _The Noble Hustle_ was released...to say nothing of _The Underground Railroad_).
(NOTE: What is appended here is the table of contents, an excerpt from Chapter One that lays out the critical apparatus of the book, and the bibliography for the volume)
----------------------------------
Reviews:
"Derek C. Maus’s book _Understanding Colson Whitehead_ constitutes an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on Whitehead. Hundreds of reviewers have commented on Whitehead’s individual books, and several literary scholars have published articles highlighting aspects of his writing. However, Understanding Colson Whitehead is the first book-length examination, and thus a notable cornerstone in what might someday become known as Whitehead studies. [...]
Further, Maus’s book represents a surprisingly rare extended treatment on an African American writer born after 1960. [...]
_Understanding Colson Whitehead_ rewards those who are new to the novelist’s works as well as his longtime readers. Maus summarizes and then provides in-depth analyses of Whitehead’s books, highlighting the workings of the individual selections. The overall examination paints a broad and detailed picture of what Whitehead has produced over the years.
Given the structural complexity of Whitehead’s _John Henry Days_, Maus’s chapter on that novel is particularly notable.[...] Maus’s chapter confirms the praise reviewers placed on Whitehead after the publication of the novel and goes further by explaining the details of Whitehead’s artistic capabilities in producing such an intricate, multithreaded novel.
_Understanding Colson Whitehead_ offers many important insights concerning the novelist’s compositions."
-- Howard Rambsy II, in _African American Review_ 48.4 (Winter 2015): 482-83.
--------------
"This volume on Whitehead...announces that his work should be taken as seriously as that of other authors in the series, such as Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and David Foster Wallace. Maus (SUNY, Potsdam) does an admirable job of explaining Whitehead's aesthetics and reading his novels. [...] Maus is particularly strong when discussing _Sag Harbor_, which he calls Whitehead's most accessible yet least understood work, and when addressing Whitehead's debut novel, _The Intuitionist_. This volume should help move Whitehead onto classroom syllabi and further the current critical conversation about his works. [...] Highly recommended."
-- D.J. Rosenthal, _Choice_ 52.10 (June 2015)
--------------
"Derek Maus's _Understanding Colson Whitehead_ is a comprehensive overview of Whitehead's shape-shifting ouevre...The chapters all give in-depth analyses of Whitehead's novels, building on the work of other critics while offering fresh readings. Maus gives academics and Whitehead fans alike a crisp and thorough reading of this work."
-- _Forum on Modern Language Studies_ 51.4 (October 2015)
--------------
"Maus’s book is an excellent and enlightening guide to Whitehead’s work"
-- Christian Lorentzen, Vulture.com (http://www.vulture.com/2016/09/how-colson-whitehead-got-from-zombies-to-slavery.html)
------> Now available as open-source e-book at https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/uscpress_pub/7/ <---... more ------> Now available as open-source e-book at https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/uscpress_pub/7/ <------
_Unvarnishing Reality_ draws original insight to the literature, politics, history, and culture of the cold war by closely examining the themes and goals of American and Russian satirical fiction. As Derek Maus illustrates, the paranoia of nuclear standoff provided a subversive storytelling mode for authors from both nations--including Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, John Barth, Walker Percy, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Vasily Aksyonov, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Alexander Zinoviev, Vladimir Voinovich, Fazil Iskander, and Sasha Sokolov." ///// REVIEWS:
"The breadth of Maus's critical reading is impressive and sets his text apart from other treatments of Cold War literature that include Soviet and/or Russian material.[...] Highly recommended."
-- Brian Diemert, _Choice_ (Dec. 2011) /////
"Maus's study constantly engages in suggestive juxtapositions between American and Russian works that shed fresh light on their narrative practices."
-- David Seed, _Utopian Studies_ 23.2 (2012) /////
"Maus has read voluminously in his subject, both in the literature and in critical studies [...]. He is to be applauded for his fresh readings of dystopian classics as well as for bringing lesser-known writers into the story.[...] If a reader is looking for a quick survey of Russian and American Cold War fiction, this is it."
-- Denise Youngblood, _Slavic Review_ 71.3 (Fall 2012) /////
"Maus’s analysis of the individual texts will give the reader new ways of thinking about them. Historians who work on the cultural history of the era will no doubt want to consider the insights he offers into the language and philosophy of satirical fiction."
-- Mara Drogan, _Cold War History_ 13.2 (2013) /////
"On the US side, the closest analogy to the totalitarian system is the totalizing drive of certain languages—anticommunist, mediatic-consumerist, bureaucratic, technologically utopian—chiefly in the American 1950s and then again in the 1980s [...] To be sure, none of these coalesce into the langue de bois (the “wooden tongue”) that all but takes over public discourse in the East, nor do they enjoy the logistical and institutional backing afforded by the Kremlin apparatus, Pynchonian paranoia notwithstanding. And yet, Maus is right: the satire of mainstream, institutional, or 'official' idioms is one kind of literature that formally and thematically can be said to bring together—and thus render comparable—writers from saliently different systems."
-- Christian Moraru, _American Literature_ 85.2 (June 2013)
Essays by Owen E. Brady, Kelly C. Connelly, Juan F. Elices, Keith Hughes, Derek C. Maus, Jerrilyn... more Essays by Owen E. Brady, Kelly C. Connelly, Juan F. Elices, Keith Hughes, Derek C. Maus, Jerrilyn McGregory, Laura Quinn, Francesca Canadé Sautman, Daniel Stein, Lisa B. Thompson, Terrence Tucker, and Albert U. Turner, Jr. In Finding a Way Home, thirteen essays by scholars from four countries trace Walter Mosley's distinctive approach to representing African American responses to the feeling of homelessness in an inhospitable America. Mosley (b. 1952) writes frequently of characters trying to construct an idea of home and wrest a sense of dignity, belonging, and hope from cultural and communal resources. These essays examine Mosley's queries about the meaning of "home" in various social and historical contexts. Essayists consider the concept--whether it be material, social, cultural, or virtual--in all three of Mosley's detective/crime fiction series ( Easy Rawlins, Socrates Fortlow, and Fearless Jones), his three books of speculative fiction, two of his "literary" novels ( RL's Dream, The Man in My Basement), and in his recent social and political nonfiction. Essays here explore Mosley's modes of expression, his testing of the limitations of genre, his political engagement in prose, his utopian/dystopian analyses, and his uses of parody and vernacular culture. Finding a Way Homeprovides rich discussions, explaining the development of Mosley's work.
Some called the anti-communist hysteria of the late 1940s and early 1950 a "witch hunt." Others c... more Some called the anti-communist hysteria of the late 1940s and early 1950 a "witch hunt." Others called it a patriotic defense of American values. This volume examines this contentious period from the perspectives of both accusers and accused, as well as chronicling some of its lingering effects on American culture.
Russia is a nation with a long and tumultuous history. It has been constantly reshaped by the oft... more Russia is a nation with a long and tumultuous history. It has been constantly reshaped by the often-violent intersection of competing factions. From the clashes of Nordic and Asiatic nomads in the early medieval period, through the struggle between czarists and revolutionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and up to the current competition for power in the post-Soviet period, this volume examines Russia as a nation defined by ethnic, political and cultural rivalries.
For nearly fifty years after the end of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union enga... more For nearly fifty years after the end of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in an ideological standoff that at times seemed to threaten the very future of the planet. This volume not only looks at the political and military strategies used by both sides during this lengthy confrontation but also at the after-effects that these strategies had on the culture of the world as a whole.
This is the front matter for an anthology I edited for Greenhaven Press that was published in 200... more This is the front matter for an anthology I edited for Greenhaven Press that was published in 2001 and is, as far as I know, now out of print (though copies are still floating around on various used-book websites). What is included here is the front matter that I wrote as well as the table of contents for the excepted pieces that I anthologized within the book.
This is the front matter for an anthology I edited for Greenhaven Press that was published in 200... more This is the front matter for an anthology I edited for Greenhaven Press that was published in 2001 and is, as far as I know, now out of print (though copies are still floating around on various used-book websites). What is included here is the front matter that I wrote as well as the table of contents for the excepted pieces that I anthologized within the book.
This is the front matter for an anthology I edited for Greenhaven Press that was published in 199... more This is the front matter for an anthology I edited for Greenhaven Press that was published in 1999 and is, as far as I know, now out of print (though copies are still floating around on various used-book websites). What is included here is the front matter that I wrote as well as the table of contents for the excepted pieces that I anthologized within the book.
Articles, Papers, and Presentations by Derek C. Maus
Presentation made at the 2023 American Studies Association conference in Montréal, QC. It examine... more Presentation made at the 2023 American Studies Association conference in Montréal, QC. It examines how and why the two "Moon" novels by the Anishnaabe author Waubgeshig Rice incorporate a specifically Indigenous (and more specifically Anishnaabe) perspective that is absent from most other works of post-apocalyptic fiction.
![Research paper thumbnail of “[O]ne is lost to understand what this has to do with the [Black] experience”: Percival Everett, André Alexis, and Racialized Authorial Expectations](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/107337756/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 2023
------> Available at https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/10061/ <-------
Percival Everet... more ------> Available at https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/10061/ <-------
Percival Everett and André Alexis have each affirmed their desire to produce art free from any external obligations by producing fiction designed to provoke and then to destabilize conditioned responses in their readers. One of the many ways in which both of them accomplish this aim is to write about subjects and in modes that confound what Lavelle Porter identifies as a host of “sloppy, simplistic, lazy, and inevitable” presumptions surrounding what Black writers should and should not write about. Both Everett and Alexis have written decidedly contemporary fiction that repurposes characters and plots from ancient Greek literature in various ways, including textual parody, metamythic pastiche, and conspicuous inclusion of Classical characters and forms into otherwise contemporary narratives. By doing so, they engage with a mythic tradition that a grossly reductive view on race and authorship perceives as not-theirs and navigate between a Scylla and Charybdis of cultural appropriation on one side and race treachery on the other. They not only explore their own aesthetic/philosophical interests through their renovations of Greek mythology, but they also hold up a mirror to the ways that the presumptions their readers bring with them affect (and limit) their interpretations.
Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison (ed. Linda Wagner-Martin and Kelly Reames), 2023
Draft of an essay co-authored with Marijana Mikić of the University of Klagenfurt. Please consult... more Draft of an essay co-authored with Marijana Mikić of the University of Klagenfurt. Please consult and cite the published version in the source indicated above if using for scholarly purposes.
In her 1997 essay "Home," Toni Morrison poses several fundamental questions that guide her literary work: "How to be both free and situated; how to convert a racist house into a race-specific yet nonracist home. How to enunciate race while depriving it of its lethal cling?" (5). These questions are integral to Morrison's own work, but she also entreats other authors to respond to them; a substantial number, including Brit Bennett, Bryan Washington, Kaitlyn Greenidge, and Akwaeke Emezi, have done so.
Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology (ed. by Alexa Weik von Mossner, Mario Grill, and Marijana Mikić), 2022
Draft of an essay ultimately published in the work indicated above. Please consult and cite the p... more Draft of an essay ultimately published in the work indicated above. Please consult and cite the published version if using for scholarly purposes.
At first glance, Percival Everett’s The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson, Roanoke, VA 1843 and Kent Monkman's multimedia project Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience may seem to have little in common beyond their somewhat unwieldy titles. Everett’s book initially appears to be a book of poems by a Virginia slaveowner and annotated by (in)famous South Carolina statesman John C. Calhoun, whereas the 2017 exhibition that Monkman curated is accompanied a purported memoir by Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, a subversively satirical First Nations figure who also appears prominently in many of Monkman’s parodies of traditional Canadian painting. Each of them utilizes what transmedia scholar Matt Hills – building on the work of Gerard Genette and others – called “coordinating metaparatexts” in creating scathingly satirical commentaries on the manner in which dehumanizing racial and/or ethnic identities have been constructed and disseminated by the dominant (white) cultures of the United States and Canada. The understood omnipresence of both Everett and Monkman as these works' ultimate creators creates the satirical paratextual layer that historiographically frames and alters the artificial paratextual relationship at their core.
Uploads
Books by Derek C. Maus
“Jesting in Earnest establishes a critical vocabulary that Everett scholars will find invaluable. In specifying Everett as a Menippean satirist, Maus lays an astute and essential foundation for the growing field of study of this important novelist’s work.” — Anthony Stewart, Bucknell University ///// “From the very specific and relevant point of view of Menippean satire, Derek Maus offers a thorough exegesis of Everett’s oeuvre. Taking his cue from Everett’s work Maus destabilizes preconceived ideas to promote genuine reflection.” — Anne-Laure Tissut, Rouen University ///// “Knowledgeable, accessible, and synthetic, Jesting in Earnest is a perfect introduction to Percival Everett’s complex, motley fiction. It convincingly foregrounds Menippean satire as the core subversive mode at the heart of Everett’s project of challenging all linguistic, generic, and ideological assumptions. This first monograph constitutes a tribute worthy of Everett’s remarkable achievement.” — Michel Feith, University of Nantes ///// [What is presented here is both a table of contents for the manuscript and a draft version of the book's introduction. Neither of these should be quoted as consistent with the book version, as both some of the language and the pagination has changed substantially in the final print and e-book versions.]
This is a draft of my introduction for the volume. It is NOT the final version of the printed text, nor should it be cited as such.
Edited by two of Maurice Kenny’s colleagues at SUNY Potsdam — Derek C. Maus and Donald J. McNutt — and published by Many Moons Press (a literary imprint that Maurice himself started), this anthology includes not only twenty-seven previously unpublished works of poetry, prose, and sketching by Maurice himself, but also dozens more written and visual tributes to Maurice by friends, colleagues, students, and collaborators from throughout his long and storied life.
Includes contributions by Jordan Ricks, Randy Lewis, Anna Neva, Duane Niatum, Béatrice Machet, Stephen Lewandowski, Derek C. Maus, Oscar Sarmiento, gabor g gyukics, Marty Thompson, Neal Burdick, Colin Pope, Ed Kanze, Ethan Shantie, Alex French, Phil Gallos, Lance Henson, Walter Hoelbling, Alan Steinberg, Dennis Maloney, Kayla French, Dan Bodah, Stephanie Coyne DeGhett, Alfred Hoch, Joe Bruchac, John Radigan, Renée Sadhana, Chad Sweeney, and Daniela Gioseffi.
Such works have been variously called "post-black," "post-soul," and examples of a "New Black Aesthetic." Whatever the label, this collection bears witness to a noteworthy shift regarding the ways in which African American satirists feel constrained by conventional obligations when treating issues of racial identity, historical memory, and material representation of blackness.
Among the artists examined in this collection are Paul Beatty, Dave Chappelle, Trey Ellis, Percival Everett, Donald Glover (a.k.a. Childish Gambino), Spike Lee, Aaron McGruder, Lynn Nottage, ZZ Packer, Suzan Lori-Parks, Mickalene Thomas, Toure, Kara Walker, and George C. Wolfe. The essays intentionally seek out interconnections among various forms of artistic expression. Contributors look at the ways in which contemporary African American satire engages in a broad ranging critique that exposes fraudulent, outdated, absurd, or otherwise damaging mindsets and behaviors both within and outside the African American community.
Includes essays by Bertram D. Ashe, Thomas R. Britt, Darryl Dickson-Carr, James J. Donahue, Michael B. Gillespie, Gillian Johns, Luvena Kopp, Jennifer Larson, Cameron Leader-Picone, Brandon Manning, Marvin McAllister, Danielle Fuentes Morgan, Derek Conrad Murray, Kinohi Nishikawa, Keenan Norris, Christian Schmidt, Linda Furgerson Selzer, Terrence T. Tucker, Sam Vásquez, and Aimee Zygmonski; with a critical introduction by Derek C. Maus.
---------------------------
Reviews:
"The twenty-one essays that follow coeditor Derek C. Maus’s fine introduction to this tome demonstrate that, while post-soul may be a contentious epithet, the book _Post-Soul Satire_ is a scholarly treasure trove for those interested in the outcropping of satirical African American writing, visual art, music, film, and television that appeared in the twenty-five years following the publication of novelist Trey Ellis’s much discussed article “The New Black Aesthetic” in the Winter 1989 issue of _Callaloo_.[...]
_Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights_ maps the courageous (to some), unsettling (to others) trajectory African American print, dramatic, and visual artists have pursued in the recent past. And given the present-day socioeconomic and political circumstances in America and abroad, it seems clear that African American satirists will have no need to dull, much less put away, their barbed weapons any time soon. Though the task is daunting, our satirists, with Juvenalian scorn and Horatian mockery, will continue to expose societal warts and cancers with the goal of ameliorating broken aspects of America’s social contract, and _Post-Soul Satire_ will provide the rest of us with a powerful framework for better understanding the complex challenges these artists do and will face. This is not merely a good book but an important one."
-- Joe Weixlmann, _African American Review_ 48.1-2 (Spring-Summer 2015)
"In this dexterous, cogent collection, Maus and Donahue (both, SUNY Potsdam) gather 21 scholarly essays that examine the use, effectiveness, and embrace of satire within African American art of the last two decades. Taken together, the essays propose that satirical postures in contemporary black art communicate an imperative among a new generation of black artists to broaden and redefine African American identity in the post–civil rights/Obama (read “post-black”) era. Though complex at times, the critical work accomplished here sustains engagement. The contributors exhibit an admirable command of history, theory, lexicon, and cultural aesthetics. Moreover, the depth and range of analyses encourage exploration of the many primary texts examined in these pages. Particular attention is paid to the works of Kara Walker, Percival Everett, Aaron McGruder, and Touré. Though these offerings—replete with challenging academic language and lofty theorizations—do not lend themselves to readers outside the academy, those interested in thoughtful critiques of popular culture, literature, media studies, and African American studies will find abundant rewards here. Summing Up: Highly recommended."
-- Jarret Neal, _Choice_ 52.8 (April 2015)
"While there are a number of books on the concepts of post-soul and post-racial (many referenced in the book’s nineteen essays), this collection could be an excellent place to begin one’s education on the topic, even given the focus on satire. The range of material and depth of investigation into satiric representations of black subjectivity in a variety of media is impressive. In his introduction to the collection, Derek Maus makes a persuasive case for the strength of an African American brand of satire significant for understanding current comic art in the United States."
-- James E. Caron, _Studies in American Humor_ 2.1 (Jan. 2016)
"Ultimately, this text will be useful to anyone who is particularly interested in satire, its inner workings, and its social and political impact. It is also going to be useful to anyone researching Black humor as well as those working with the complex methods by which some Black Americans negotiate complicated positions in contemporary society. Furthermore, given recent discussions in the public sphere regarding what does and does not count as satire and who should or should not be the targets of satire, the text seems especially relevant."
-- Jacinta Yanders, _Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature_ 45.1 (2017)
"Post-Soul Satire is a well-chosen assortment of essays that discusses African American issues in various media within the cultural context of the United States and in terms of the phenomenon of post-soul[...]. It is an important contribution to American humor studies, given its sustained focus on satire, humor, and irony."
-- Debarati Byabartta, _Studies in American Humor_ 3.2 (2017)
(NOTE: What is appended here is the table of contents, an excerpt from Chapter One that lays out the critical apparatus of the book, and the bibliography for the volume)
----------------------------------
Reviews:
"Derek C. Maus’s book _Understanding Colson Whitehead_ constitutes an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on Whitehead. Hundreds of reviewers have commented on Whitehead’s individual books, and several literary scholars have published articles highlighting aspects of his writing. However, Understanding Colson Whitehead is the first book-length examination, and thus a notable cornerstone in what might someday become known as Whitehead studies. [...]
Further, Maus’s book represents a surprisingly rare extended treatment on an African American writer born after 1960. [...]
_Understanding Colson Whitehead_ rewards those who are new to the novelist’s works as well as his longtime readers. Maus summarizes and then provides in-depth analyses of Whitehead’s books, highlighting the workings of the individual selections. The overall examination paints a broad and detailed picture of what Whitehead has produced over the years.
Given the structural complexity of Whitehead’s _John Henry Days_, Maus’s chapter on that novel is particularly notable.[...] Maus’s chapter confirms the praise reviewers placed on Whitehead after the publication of the novel and goes further by explaining the details of Whitehead’s artistic capabilities in producing such an intricate, multithreaded novel.
_Understanding Colson Whitehead_ offers many important insights concerning the novelist’s compositions."
-- Howard Rambsy II, in _African American Review_ 48.4 (Winter 2015): 482-83.
--------------
"This volume on Whitehead...announces that his work should be taken as seriously as that of other authors in the series, such as Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and David Foster Wallace. Maus (SUNY, Potsdam) does an admirable job of explaining Whitehead's aesthetics and reading his novels. [...] Maus is particularly strong when discussing _Sag Harbor_, which he calls Whitehead's most accessible yet least understood work, and when addressing Whitehead's debut novel, _The Intuitionist_. This volume should help move Whitehead onto classroom syllabi and further the current critical conversation about his works. [...] Highly recommended."
-- D.J. Rosenthal, _Choice_ 52.10 (June 2015)
--------------
"Derek Maus's _Understanding Colson Whitehead_ is a comprehensive overview of Whitehead's shape-shifting ouevre...The chapters all give in-depth analyses of Whitehead's novels, building on the work of other critics while offering fresh readings. Maus gives academics and Whitehead fans alike a crisp and thorough reading of this work."
-- _Forum on Modern Language Studies_ 51.4 (October 2015)
--------------
"Maus’s book is an excellent and enlightening guide to Whitehead’s work"
-- Christian Lorentzen, Vulture.com (http://www.vulture.com/2016/09/how-colson-whitehead-got-from-zombies-to-slavery.html)
_Unvarnishing Reality_ draws original insight to the literature, politics, history, and culture of the cold war by closely examining the themes and goals of American and Russian satirical fiction. As Derek Maus illustrates, the paranoia of nuclear standoff provided a subversive storytelling mode for authors from both nations--including Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, John Barth, Walker Percy, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Vasily Aksyonov, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Alexander Zinoviev, Vladimir Voinovich, Fazil Iskander, and Sasha Sokolov." ///// REVIEWS:
"The breadth of Maus's critical reading is impressive and sets his text apart from other treatments of Cold War literature that include Soviet and/or Russian material.[...] Highly recommended."
-- Brian Diemert, _Choice_ (Dec. 2011) /////
"Maus's study constantly engages in suggestive juxtapositions between American and Russian works that shed fresh light on their narrative practices."
-- David Seed, _Utopian Studies_ 23.2 (2012) /////
"Maus has read voluminously in his subject, both in the literature and in critical studies [...]. He is to be applauded for his fresh readings of dystopian classics as well as for bringing lesser-known writers into the story.[...] If a reader is looking for a quick survey of Russian and American Cold War fiction, this is it."
-- Denise Youngblood, _Slavic Review_ 71.3 (Fall 2012) /////
"Maus’s analysis of the individual texts will give the reader new ways of thinking about them. Historians who work on the cultural history of the era will no doubt want to consider the insights he offers into the language and philosophy of satirical fiction."
-- Mara Drogan, _Cold War History_ 13.2 (2013) /////
"On the US side, the closest analogy to the totalitarian system is the totalizing drive of certain languages—anticommunist, mediatic-consumerist, bureaucratic, technologically utopian—chiefly in the American 1950s and then again in the 1980s [...] To be sure, none of these coalesce into the langue de bois (the “wooden tongue”) that all but takes over public discourse in the East, nor do they enjoy the logistical and institutional backing afforded by the Kremlin apparatus, Pynchonian paranoia notwithstanding. And yet, Maus is right: the satire of mainstream, institutional, or 'official' idioms is one kind of literature that formally and thematically can be said to bring together—and thus render comparable—writers from saliently different systems."
-- Christian Moraru, _American Literature_ 85.2 (June 2013)
Articles, Papers, and Presentations by Derek C. Maus
Percival Everett and André Alexis have each affirmed their desire to produce art free from any external obligations by producing fiction designed to provoke and then to destabilize conditioned responses in their readers. One of the many ways in which both of them accomplish this aim is to write about subjects and in modes that confound what Lavelle Porter identifies as a host of “sloppy, simplistic, lazy, and inevitable” presumptions surrounding what Black writers should and should not write about. Both Everett and Alexis have written decidedly contemporary fiction that repurposes characters and plots from ancient Greek literature in various ways, including textual parody, metamythic pastiche, and conspicuous inclusion of Classical characters and forms into otherwise contemporary narratives. By doing so, they engage with a mythic tradition that a grossly reductive view on race and authorship perceives as not-theirs and navigate between a Scylla and Charybdis of cultural appropriation on one side and race treachery on the other. They not only explore their own aesthetic/philosophical interests through their renovations of Greek mythology, but they also hold up a mirror to the ways that the presumptions their readers bring with them affect (and limit) their interpretations.
In her 1997 essay "Home," Toni Morrison poses several fundamental questions that guide her literary work: "How to be both free and situated; how to convert a racist house into a race-specific yet nonracist home. How to enunciate race while depriving it of its lethal cling?" (5). These questions are integral to Morrison's own work, but she also entreats other authors to respond to them; a substantial number, including Brit Bennett, Bryan Washington, Kaitlyn Greenidge, and Akwaeke Emezi, have done so.
At first glance, Percival Everett’s The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson, Roanoke, VA 1843 and Kent Monkman's multimedia project Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience may seem to have little in common beyond their somewhat unwieldy titles. Everett’s book initially appears to be a book of poems by a Virginia slaveowner and annotated by (in)famous South Carolina statesman John C. Calhoun, whereas the 2017 exhibition that Monkman curated is accompanied a purported memoir by Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, a subversively satirical First Nations figure who also appears prominently in many of Monkman’s parodies of traditional Canadian painting. Each of them utilizes what transmedia scholar Matt Hills – building on the work of Gerard Genette and others – called “coordinating metaparatexts” in creating scathingly satirical commentaries on the manner in which dehumanizing racial and/or ethnic identities have been constructed and disseminated by the dominant (white) cultures of the United States and Canada. The understood omnipresence of both Everett and Monkman as these works' ultimate creators creates the satirical paratextual layer that historiographically frames and alters the artificial paratextual relationship at their core.
“Jesting in Earnest establishes a critical vocabulary that Everett scholars will find invaluable. In specifying Everett as a Menippean satirist, Maus lays an astute and essential foundation for the growing field of study of this important novelist’s work.” — Anthony Stewart, Bucknell University ///// “From the very specific and relevant point of view of Menippean satire, Derek Maus offers a thorough exegesis of Everett’s oeuvre. Taking his cue from Everett’s work Maus destabilizes preconceived ideas to promote genuine reflection.” — Anne-Laure Tissut, Rouen University ///// “Knowledgeable, accessible, and synthetic, Jesting in Earnest is a perfect introduction to Percival Everett’s complex, motley fiction. It convincingly foregrounds Menippean satire as the core subversive mode at the heart of Everett’s project of challenging all linguistic, generic, and ideological assumptions. This first monograph constitutes a tribute worthy of Everett’s remarkable achievement.” — Michel Feith, University of Nantes ///// [What is presented here is both a table of contents for the manuscript and a draft version of the book's introduction. Neither of these should be quoted as consistent with the book version, as both some of the language and the pagination has changed substantially in the final print and e-book versions.]
This is a draft of my introduction for the volume. It is NOT the final version of the printed text, nor should it be cited as such.
Edited by two of Maurice Kenny’s colleagues at SUNY Potsdam — Derek C. Maus and Donald J. McNutt — and published by Many Moons Press (a literary imprint that Maurice himself started), this anthology includes not only twenty-seven previously unpublished works of poetry, prose, and sketching by Maurice himself, but also dozens more written and visual tributes to Maurice by friends, colleagues, students, and collaborators from throughout his long and storied life.
Includes contributions by Jordan Ricks, Randy Lewis, Anna Neva, Duane Niatum, Béatrice Machet, Stephen Lewandowski, Derek C. Maus, Oscar Sarmiento, gabor g gyukics, Marty Thompson, Neal Burdick, Colin Pope, Ed Kanze, Ethan Shantie, Alex French, Phil Gallos, Lance Henson, Walter Hoelbling, Alan Steinberg, Dennis Maloney, Kayla French, Dan Bodah, Stephanie Coyne DeGhett, Alfred Hoch, Joe Bruchac, John Radigan, Renée Sadhana, Chad Sweeney, and Daniela Gioseffi.
Such works have been variously called "post-black," "post-soul," and examples of a "New Black Aesthetic." Whatever the label, this collection bears witness to a noteworthy shift regarding the ways in which African American satirists feel constrained by conventional obligations when treating issues of racial identity, historical memory, and material representation of blackness.
Among the artists examined in this collection are Paul Beatty, Dave Chappelle, Trey Ellis, Percival Everett, Donald Glover (a.k.a. Childish Gambino), Spike Lee, Aaron McGruder, Lynn Nottage, ZZ Packer, Suzan Lori-Parks, Mickalene Thomas, Toure, Kara Walker, and George C. Wolfe. The essays intentionally seek out interconnections among various forms of artistic expression. Contributors look at the ways in which contemporary African American satire engages in a broad ranging critique that exposes fraudulent, outdated, absurd, or otherwise damaging mindsets and behaviors both within and outside the African American community.
Includes essays by Bertram D. Ashe, Thomas R. Britt, Darryl Dickson-Carr, James J. Donahue, Michael B. Gillespie, Gillian Johns, Luvena Kopp, Jennifer Larson, Cameron Leader-Picone, Brandon Manning, Marvin McAllister, Danielle Fuentes Morgan, Derek Conrad Murray, Kinohi Nishikawa, Keenan Norris, Christian Schmidt, Linda Furgerson Selzer, Terrence T. Tucker, Sam Vásquez, and Aimee Zygmonski; with a critical introduction by Derek C. Maus.
---------------------------
Reviews:
"The twenty-one essays that follow coeditor Derek C. Maus’s fine introduction to this tome demonstrate that, while post-soul may be a contentious epithet, the book _Post-Soul Satire_ is a scholarly treasure trove for those interested in the outcropping of satirical African American writing, visual art, music, film, and television that appeared in the twenty-five years following the publication of novelist Trey Ellis’s much discussed article “The New Black Aesthetic” in the Winter 1989 issue of _Callaloo_.[...]
_Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights_ maps the courageous (to some), unsettling (to others) trajectory African American print, dramatic, and visual artists have pursued in the recent past. And given the present-day socioeconomic and political circumstances in America and abroad, it seems clear that African American satirists will have no need to dull, much less put away, their barbed weapons any time soon. Though the task is daunting, our satirists, with Juvenalian scorn and Horatian mockery, will continue to expose societal warts and cancers with the goal of ameliorating broken aspects of America’s social contract, and _Post-Soul Satire_ will provide the rest of us with a powerful framework for better understanding the complex challenges these artists do and will face. This is not merely a good book but an important one."
-- Joe Weixlmann, _African American Review_ 48.1-2 (Spring-Summer 2015)
"In this dexterous, cogent collection, Maus and Donahue (both, SUNY Potsdam) gather 21 scholarly essays that examine the use, effectiveness, and embrace of satire within African American art of the last two decades. Taken together, the essays propose that satirical postures in contemporary black art communicate an imperative among a new generation of black artists to broaden and redefine African American identity in the post–civil rights/Obama (read “post-black”) era. Though complex at times, the critical work accomplished here sustains engagement. The contributors exhibit an admirable command of history, theory, lexicon, and cultural aesthetics. Moreover, the depth and range of analyses encourage exploration of the many primary texts examined in these pages. Particular attention is paid to the works of Kara Walker, Percival Everett, Aaron McGruder, and Touré. Though these offerings—replete with challenging academic language and lofty theorizations—do not lend themselves to readers outside the academy, those interested in thoughtful critiques of popular culture, literature, media studies, and African American studies will find abundant rewards here. Summing Up: Highly recommended."
-- Jarret Neal, _Choice_ 52.8 (April 2015)
"While there are a number of books on the concepts of post-soul and post-racial (many referenced in the book’s nineteen essays), this collection could be an excellent place to begin one’s education on the topic, even given the focus on satire. The range of material and depth of investigation into satiric representations of black subjectivity in a variety of media is impressive. In his introduction to the collection, Derek Maus makes a persuasive case for the strength of an African American brand of satire significant for understanding current comic art in the United States."
-- James E. Caron, _Studies in American Humor_ 2.1 (Jan. 2016)
"Ultimately, this text will be useful to anyone who is particularly interested in satire, its inner workings, and its social and political impact. It is also going to be useful to anyone researching Black humor as well as those working with the complex methods by which some Black Americans negotiate complicated positions in contemporary society. Furthermore, given recent discussions in the public sphere regarding what does and does not count as satire and who should or should not be the targets of satire, the text seems especially relevant."
-- Jacinta Yanders, _Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature_ 45.1 (2017)
"Post-Soul Satire is a well-chosen assortment of essays that discusses African American issues in various media within the cultural context of the United States and in terms of the phenomenon of post-soul[...]. It is an important contribution to American humor studies, given its sustained focus on satire, humor, and irony."
-- Debarati Byabartta, _Studies in American Humor_ 3.2 (2017)
(NOTE: What is appended here is the table of contents, an excerpt from Chapter One that lays out the critical apparatus of the book, and the bibliography for the volume)
----------------------------------
Reviews:
"Derek C. Maus’s book _Understanding Colson Whitehead_ constitutes an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on Whitehead. Hundreds of reviewers have commented on Whitehead’s individual books, and several literary scholars have published articles highlighting aspects of his writing. However, Understanding Colson Whitehead is the first book-length examination, and thus a notable cornerstone in what might someday become known as Whitehead studies. [...]
Further, Maus’s book represents a surprisingly rare extended treatment on an African American writer born after 1960. [...]
_Understanding Colson Whitehead_ rewards those who are new to the novelist’s works as well as his longtime readers. Maus summarizes and then provides in-depth analyses of Whitehead’s books, highlighting the workings of the individual selections. The overall examination paints a broad and detailed picture of what Whitehead has produced over the years.
Given the structural complexity of Whitehead’s _John Henry Days_, Maus’s chapter on that novel is particularly notable.[...] Maus’s chapter confirms the praise reviewers placed on Whitehead after the publication of the novel and goes further by explaining the details of Whitehead’s artistic capabilities in producing such an intricate, multithreaded novel.
_Understanding Colson Whitehead_ offers many important insights concerning the novelist’s compositions."
-- Howard Rambsy II, in _African American Review_ 48.4 (Winter 2015): 482-83.
--------------
"This volume on Whitehead...announces that his work should be taken as seriously as that of other authors in the series, such as Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and David Foster Wallace. Maus (SUNY, Potsdam) does an admirable job of explaining Whitehead's aesthetics and reading his novels. [...] Maus is particularly strong when discussing _Sag Harbor_, which he calls Whitehead's most accessible yet least understood work, and when addressing Whitehead's debut novel, _The Intuitionist_. This volume should help move Whitehead onto classroom syllabi and further the current critical conversation about his works. [...] Highly recommended."
-- D.J. Rosenthal, _Choice_ 52.10 (June 2015)
--------------
"Derek Maus's _Understanding Colson Whitehead_ is a comprehensive overview of Whitehead's shape-shifting ouevre...The chapters all give in-depth analyses of Whitehead's novels, building on the work of other critics while offering fresh readings. Maus gives academics and Whitehead fans alike a crisp and thorough reading of this work."
-- _Forum on Modern Language Studies_ 51.4 (October 2015)
--------------
"Maus’s book is an excellent and enlightening guide to Whitehead’s work"
-- Christian Lorentzen, Vulture.com (http://www.vulture.com/2016/09/how-colson-whitehead-got-from-zombies-to-slavery.html)
_Unvarnishing Reality_ draws original insight to the literature, politics, history, and culture of the cold war by closely examining the themes and goals of American and Russian satirical fiction. As Derek Maus illustrates, the paranoia of nuclear standoff provided a subversive storytelling mode for authors from both nations--including Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, John Barth, Walker Percy, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Vasily Aksyonov, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Alexander Zinoviev, Vladimir Voinovich, Fazil Iskander, and Sasha Sokolov." ///// REVIEWS:
"The breadth of Maus's critical reading is impressive and sets his text apart from other treatments of Cold War literature that include Soviet and/or Russian material.[...] Highly recommended."
-- Brian Diemert, _Choice_ (Dec. 2011) /////
"Maus's study constantly engages in suggestive juxtapositions between American and Russian works that shed fresh light on their narrative practices."
-- David Seed, _Utopian Studies_ 23.2 (2012) /////
"Maus has read voluminously in his subject, both in the literature and in critical studies [...]. He is to be applauded for his fresh readings of dystopian classics as well as for bringing lesser-known writers into the story.[...] If a reader is looking for a quick survey of Russian and American Cold War fiction, this is it."
-- Denise Youngblood, _Slavic Review_ 71.3 (Fall 2012) /////
"Maus’s analysis of the individual texts will give the reader new ways of thinking about them. Historians who work on the cultural history of the era will no doubt want to consider the insights he offers into the language and philosophy of satirical fiction."
-- Mara Drogan, _Cold War History_ 13.2 (2013) /////
"On the US side, the closest analogy to the totalitarian system is the totalizing drive of certain languages—anticommunist, mediatic-consumerist, bureaucratic, technologically utopian—chiefly in the American 1950s and then again in the 1980s [...] To be sure, none of these coalesce into the langue de bois (the “wooden tongue”) that all but takes over public discourse in the East, nor do they enjoy the logistical and institutional backing afforded by the Kremlin apparatus, Pynchonian paranoia notwithstanding. And yet, Maus is right: the satire of mainstream, institutional, or 'official' idioms is one kind of literature that formally and thematically can be said to bring together—and thus render comparable—writers from saliently different systems."
-- Christian Moraru, _American Literature_ 85.2 (June 2013)
Percival Everett and André Alexis have each affirmed their desire to produce art free from any external obligations by producing fiction designed to provoke and then to destabilize conditioned responses in their readers. One of the many ways in which both of them accomplish this aim is to write about subjects and in modes that confound what Lavelle Porter identifies as a host of “sloppy, simplistic, lazy, and inevitable” presumptions surrounding what Black writers should and should not write about. Both Everett and Alexis have written decidedly contemporary fiction that repurposes characters and plots from ancient Greek literature in various ways, including textual parody, metamythic pastiche, and conspicuous inclusion of Classical characters and forms into otherwise contemporary narratives. By doing so, they engage with a mythic tradition that a grossly reductive view on race and authorship perceives as not-theirs and navigate between a Scylla and Charybdis of cultural appropriation on one side and race treachery on the other. They not only explore their own aesthetic/philosophical interests through their renovations of Greek mythology, but they also hold up a mirror to the ways that the presumptions their readers bring with them affect (and limit) their interpretations.
In her 1997 essay "Home," Toni Morrison poses several fundamental questions that guide her literary work: "How to be both free and situated; how to convert a racist house into a race-specific yet nonracist home. How to enunciate race while depriving it of its lethal cling?" (5). These questions are integral to Morrison's own work, but she also entreats other authors to respond to them; a substantial number, including Brit Bennett, Bryan Washington, Kaitlyn Greenidge, and Akwaeke Emezi, have done so.
At first glance, Percival Everett’s The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson, Roanoke, VA 1843 and Kent Monkman's multimedia project Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience may seem to have little in common beyond their somewhat unwieldy titles. Everett’s book initially appears to be a book of poems by a Virginia slaveowner and annotated by (in)famous South Carolina statesman John C. Calhoun, whereas the 2017 exhibition that Monkman curated is accompanied a purported memoir by Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, a subversively satirical First Nations figure who also appears prominently in many of Monkman’s parodies of traditional Canadian painting. Each of them utilizes what transmedia scholar Matt Hills – building on the work of Gerard Genette and others – called “coordinating metaparatexts” in creating scathingly satirical commentaries on the manner in which dehumanizing racial and/or ethnic identities have been constructed and disseminated by the dominant (white) cultures of the United States and Canada. The understood omnipresence of both Everett and Monkman as these works' ultimate creators creates the satirical paratextual layer that historiographically frames and alters the artificial paratextual relationship at their core.
An essay looking at four novels from 2016, Natashia Déon’s _Grace_, Yaa Gyasi’s _Homegoing_, Ben H. Winters’s _Underground Airlines_, and Colson Whitehead’s _The Underground Railroad_ -- in terms of how each uses a post-black perspective to depict slavery in what would soon be the Age of Trump.
The finished essay (which should be consulted and cited in lieu of this draft in any formal scholarly work) appears in _Who Can Speak and Who Is Heard/Hurt?: Facing Problems of “Race,” Racism, and Ethnic Diversity in the Humanities in Germany_ which is edited by Mahmoud Arghavan, Nicole Hirschfelder, Luvena Kopp, and Katharina Motyl. It is available from Transcript Verlag/Columbia University Press.
In light of Everett’s oft-stated regard for such Menippean satirists as Cervantes, Sterne, Twain, Coover, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, and Samuel Butler, it makes sense to take up a task originally suggested as a footnoted aside in an article by Michel Feith: “There would be much to say about the formal connection between several of Everett’s more ‘philosophical’ novels and Menippean satire.” A handful of other Everett scholars – Françoise Sammarcelli, Marguerite Déon, and Sebastian Fett – have briefly engaged with Menippean satire in discussing his work, but no one has yet used it as the focal point for his or her interpretation. I find that such an approach provides pathways into Everett’s work without conversely pinning it in place, giving guidance to the reader without foreclosing his or her ability – or, as Everett would insist, responsibility – to think further about a particular work’s meaning. Everett’s candid and complete reassignment of the meaning-making process to his reader is both obligating and liberating…and completely in keeping with Menippean satire’s criticism of bad philosophy (and, thus, unskilled philosophers).
In order to give this talk some currency beyond the boundaries of the published version of Jesting in Earnest – which is already slightly outdated, thanks to Everett’s brisk pace of publication and the rather less brisk pace of scholarly publishing – I will close my talk by applying my method to Everett’s most recent work, The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843: Annotated From the Library of John C. Calhoun (Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, 2019), a wholly Menippean work that satirizes not only the bigoted logic that underpinned American chattel slavery, but also the ongoing political/philosophical/social legacy of the Confederacy represented by Calhoun’s marginalia within Thompson’s fictional “text on the training of our black animals…on shepherding them from animal existence to human coexistence with us” (8)
During and immediately after the crisis that resulted in Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, a number of commentators in the US media referenced Lev Tolstoy’s _Sebastopol Sketches_ and Vasily Aksyonov’s _The Island of Crimea_ as works of literary fiction that helped to explain or even predicted present-day events. Although there is some superficial truth to such statements, both works are actually far more interested in exposing and undermining processes that distorted the reality of Crimea – historical in Tolstoy’s case, speculative in Aksyonov’s – in the service of Russian nationalism. The 2014 crisis was just one of many instances in the past three centuries that involved the use of a “hyperreal” rhetoric of kinship that ostensibly binds the fates of Crimea and Russia together. Rather than simply offering a particularised political commentary on past, present, and future Crimean-Russian relations, both Tolstoy and Aksyonov used Crimea as a fictionalised setting for their critique of the folly of such cynically “imagined geographies” in general.
We will begin the course with an excerpt from John Torpey’s 2000 book, _The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State_, with an eye towards gaining a clearer understanding of how the contemporary legal practices surrounding national citizenship came into being, as well as how they relate to (and complicate) the underlying cultural realities regarding the ways human communities divide and subdivide themselves. Torpey’s work offers both a conceptual and tonal primer to some of the issues regarding transnational mobility that are depicted in the books and films we’re examining this semester.
This series was produced in conjunction with the 2021 celebration of Black History Month at SUNY Potsdam.
Links to all episodes available at https://people.potsdam.edu/mausdc/bhm/.