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Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights. Ed. Derek C. Maus and James J. Donahue. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2014. 340 pp. $60.00.
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. Maus, along with fellow essayists, calls attention both to satire's outwardlooking projections-barbs "directed at political institutions, social practices, and cultural discourses that arise outside of the [African American] community and constrain, denigrate, or otherwise harm it in some way" (xiv)-as well as the increasing tendency by African American satirists to focus their attention inward, toward the black community.
The essays are arranged in four clusters so that individual pieces not only stand on their own but are allowed to exist in conversation with one another. The first cluster treats satirical impulses to be found in recent African American visual art; Aaron McGruder's syndicated newspaper strip (and later animated television series) The Boondocks; the work of hip-hop emcees Mighty Casey and Childish Gambino (Donald Glover) as well as the group Littler Brother; and three "family-friendly" comic films-Louis C.K.'s self-reflexive Pootie Tang (2001), Lance Rivera's The Perfect Holiday (2007), and Erik White's Lottery Ticket (2010)-which "satirize and dare to challenge the supercapitalist value system that permeates what is generally and generically known as 'black entertainment' " (57-58). Each of the five essays in the cluster is informative but, at least for me, Derek Conrad Murray's "Post-Black Art and the Resurrection of African American Satire" has the greatest depth, along with an impressive sweep that includes analyses of such boundary-challenging artists as Betye Saar, Kara Walker, Michael Ray Charles, Mickalene Thomas, Kehinde Wiley, and Glenn Ligon.
Next is a fiction cluster, led off by GillianJohns, who offers a sophisticated reading of Percival Everett's erasure in the context of Roland Barthes' S/Z.Johns calls our attention to the psychological and authorial fragility of Everett's protagonist, Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, by way of...