African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel.

Darryl Dickson-Carr. African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2001. 226 pp. $34.95.

The intent of this book 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 only come from very different trajectories within African American experience, but also take aim at widely divergent targets and attitudes within the broad realm of that experience. And though the book's subtitle is "The Sacredly Profane Novel," Dickson-Carr pays attention to other types of narrative, such as Langston Hughes's Simple stories and Derek Bell's And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice, that exemplify the sorts of targets and stratagems African American Satire seeks to highlight and explicate.

In his introduction, Dickson-Carr states, "If the etymology 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 feeds upon other forms, exploiting their strengths and weaknesses for its own ends.

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

One good example is George Schuyler's 1931 novel Black No More, which Dickson-Carr claims is "the first completely satirical novel written by 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 one of the most cutting--but to call it the first black science fiction novel is, I believe, to employ too broad a notion of what constitutes SF. Is Gulliver's Travels science fiction because Swift has the island of Laputa fly by "scientific" means? The manner by which the erasure of blackness is achieved in Black No More is fundamentally unimportant. What matters are the consequences of this "black no more" state. Schuyler's acid exposure of the investment so many Americans have in the enterprise of "race" is what makes this novel significant and still relevant.

Early on in his study, Dickson-Carr points to a problem with the critical and pedagogical approach to African American literature that persists, though to a lesser degree than before; that is, the tendency to view the writings of black authors "as primarily social protest literature." From this restrictive, condescending perspective, African American and other minority writers are valued primarily for their testimonies concerning oppression; they aren't expected to be artists. The desire to escape from this documentary or sociological "bag" is perhaps most freely expressed in Ishmael Reed's second novel, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), when the Loop Garoo Kid declares that "a novel... can be anything it wants to be." The same is true of African Americans, who need not conform to anyone's stereotypes or notions of "authenticity." Indeed, toward the end of his study, Dickson-Carr says that Toni Morrison, "like Wallace Thurman and Ralph Ellison before her, satirizes the concept 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 own narrative" that explores "the breadth of possible experiences" they confront.

One of the virtues of this book is that it pays careful attention to a number of authors and works that have been forgotten or generally disregarded by 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 recent works that have yet to receive a careful assessment--for instance, Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle and Darius James's Negrophobia. I certainly wouldn't argue that all of these books are works of equal or surpassing value, but in the maelstrom of canon-making it may be worthwhile to keep in mind that a good deal of black writing has suffered relative neglect while some other black writing has enjoyed perhaps too much attention (though this phenomenon is not confined to the African American field alone).

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

Despite its frequent appeals to cultural essentialism, the Black Arts movement correctly identified, theorized, and channeled the sense of negritude that had flowered in African American communities in the 1960s. In effect, 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 fully embracing the African, however complex and contingent that identity might be.

This statement would be right on the money if the word correctly were struck from the first sentence, since some of the theorizing within the Black Arts Movement was too dogmatic and occasionally based on misconceptions of Africa. (One would hope, too, that the reader is familiar with the history and controversy surrounding the term negritude, generally associated with the African and Antillean authors Senghor, Cesaire, and Damas.) And with regard to the last sentence, the "Blackism" that flourished during that fervent period--promulgated today by hardcore Afrocentrism--certainly would not have deployed the term contingent to characterize anything "African."

In view of the fact that the majority of au hors Dickson-Carr discusses are male, it is intriguing that he concludes his study with the prediction that, "when the satirical novel asserts its place" in twenty-first-century African American writing, "women will be at the forefront...." He doesn't offer much evidence, apart from mentioning several women who have demonstrated a "penchant for satire" in their essays; yet, given the extent to which African American women writers have "got over" in the last few decades, Dickson-Carr's conjecture is not one we can confidently dismiss.

In conclusion, Darryl Dickson-Carr's African American Satire is a significant contribution to the study of African American literature--one that is certainly overdue, and which, as its author hopes, may "be seen as a foundation upon which other scholars... may build."

[c] 2002 Robert Elliot Fox