Greater Atlanta: Black Satire After Obama

Contributions by GerShun Avilez, Lola Boorman, Thomas Britt, John Brooks, Phillip James Martinez Cortes, Derek DiMatteo, Tikenya Foster-Singletary, Alexandra Glavanakova, Erica-Brittany Horhn, Matthias Klestil, Abigail Jinju Lee, Derek C. Maus, Danielle Fuentes Morgan, Derek Conrad Murray, Kinohi Nishikawa, Sarah O’Brien, Keyana Parks, and Emily Ruth Rutter

The seventeen essays in Greater Atlanta: Black Satire after Obama collectively argue that in the years after the widespread hopefulness surrounding Barack Obama’s election as president waned, Black satire began to reveal a profound shift in US culture. Using the four seasons of the FX television show Atlanta (2016-22) as a springboard, the collection examines more than a dozen novels, films, and television shows that together reveal the ways in which Black satire has developed in response to contemporary cultural dynamics. Contributors reveal increased scorn toward self-proclaimed allies in the existential struggle still facing African Americans today.

Having started its production within a few weeks of Donald Trump’s (in)famous escalator ride in 2015, Atlanta in many ways is the perfect commentary on the absurdities of the contemporary cultural moment. The series exemplifies a significant development in contemporary Black satire, which largely eschews expectations of reform and instead offers an exasperated self-affirmation that echoes the declaration that Black Lives Matter.

Given anti-Black racism’s lengthy history, overt stimuli for outrage have predictably commanded African American satirists’ attention through the years. However, more recent works emphasize the willful ignorance underlying that history. As the volume shows, this has led to the exposure of performative allyship, virtue signaling, slacktivism, and other duplicitous forms of purported support as empty, oblivious gestures that ultimately harm African Americans as grievously as unconcealed bigotry.

Derek C. Maus is professor of English at SUNY Potsdam and author of Unvarnishing Reality: Subversive Russian and American Cold War Satire. He is also editor of Conversations with Colson Whitehead and coeditor (with Owen E. Brady) of Finding a Way Home: A Critical Assessment of Walter Mosley’s Fiction, both published by University Press of Mississippi. James J. Donahue is professor and assistant chair of the Department of English & Communication at SUNY Potsdam. He is author of Contemporary Native Fiction: Toward a Narrative Poetics of Survivance and Failed Frontiersmen: White Men and Myth in the Post-Sixties American Historical Romance and coeditor (with Jennifer Ann Ho and Shaun Morgan) of Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States. Maus and Donahue coedited Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights, published by University Press of Mississippi