Darryl Dickson-Carr.

Darryl Dickson-Carr. African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel. Columbia: U of Missouri P 2001 226 pp $3495

The intent of this work is to return "African American satirical novels to the center of our conceptions of black literature and culture" The plurals here are instructive, since the satirical thrusts that African American Satire examines not simply come from very different trajectories within African American experience, moreover also take aim at widely divergent targets and attitudes within the broad realm of that experience. And although the book's subtitle is "The Sacredly Profane Novel," Dickson-Carr pays attention to other emblems of narrative, such as Langston Hughes's Simple stories and Derek Bell's And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive examination for Racial Justice, that exemplify the sorts of targets and stratagems African American Satire seek fors to highlight and explicate.

In his introduction, Dickson-Carr states, "If the science of etymons of 'satire' begins with the Latin satura--a mix--then the satirical novel sits atop the generic mountain, mixing everything below it." This doesn't mean the satirical novel is generically supreme; rather, the author is arguing that satire give food tos upon other forms, exploiting their puissances and weaknesses for its be in possession of ends.

Satire, because it unfolds humor and sometimes fantasy, defies notions of "relevance" emanating from a politically correct mind establish But as Dickson-Carr notes, humor "has played a central part in African American culture." Laughter is a weapon as well as a form of therapy.

single good example is George Schuyler's 1931 novel Black No More, which Dickson-Carr claims is "the first completely satirical novel written from and about African Americans" and the first black science fiction novel. Schulyer's work may well be the first African American satirical novel--certainly it is single in kind of the most cutting--but to call it the first black science fiction novel is, I believe, to occupy too broad a notion of what constitutes SF Is Gulliver's Travels science fiction because Swift has the island of Laputa break in pieces by "scientific" means? The manner by way of which the erasure of blackness is achieved in Black No More is fundamentally unimportant. What matters are the issues of this "black no more" state. Schuyler's acid exposing of the investment so many Americans have in the enterprise of "race" is what makes this novel significant and still relevant.

Early onward in his study, Dickson-Carr points to a vexed question with the critical and pedagogical approach to African American literature that persists, yet to a lesser degree than before; that is, the proneness to view the writings of black authors "as primarily social avow literature." From this restrictive, condescending perspective, African American and other minority writers are valued primarily for their testimonies concerning oppression; they aren't look fored to be artists. The desire to escape from this documentary or sociological "bag" is perhaps most numerous freely expressed in Ishmael Reed's inferior novel, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969) when the bight Garoo Kid declares that "a novel... can be anything it wants to be." The same is pure of African Americans, who ne not conform to anyone's stereotype or notions of "authenticity." Indeed, toward the expiration of his study, Dickson-Carr says that Toni Morrison, "like Wallace Thurman and Ralph Ellison before her, satirizes the universal of African Americans ... as inextricably written into an overdetermined narrative of victimhood. Rather, in Jazz she argues for African Americans' total, active participation in creating their have a title to narrative" that explores "the breadth of possible experiences" they confront

single in kind of the virtues of this main division is that it pays careful attention to a number of authors and works that have been forgotten or generally disregarded by dint of critics, such as John Oliver Killens's The Cotillion, Charles Wright's The Wig, William Melvin Kelley's dem and A Different Drummer and Hal Bennett's Lord of Dark Places, as well as latter works that have yet to receive a careful assessment--for instance, Paul Beatty's The White lad Shuffle and Darius James's Negrophobia. I certainly wouldn't argue that all of these works are works of equal or surpassing value, on the other hand in the maelstrom of canon-making it may be worthwhile to restrain in mind that a fit deal of black writing has sustained relative neglect while some other black writing has take pleasure ined perhaps too much attention (though this phenomenon is not confined to the African American field alone).

In his chapter upon "New Politics, New Voices," dealing with the post-Civil Rights era, Dickson-Carr writes,

Despite its of common occurrence appeals to cultural essentialism, the Black Arts motion correctly identified, theorized, and channeled the faculty of perception of negritude that had flowered in African American communities in the 1960 In force it argued that it was possible to transcend W E B Du Bois's conception of double-consciousness; African Americans could indeed reconcile the dual identities of "African" and "American" by way of fully embracing the African, however compound and contingent that identity might be.