African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel by Darryl Dickson-Carr (review)

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 31, no. 3, 2001 American Studies in Review Darryl Dickson-Carr. African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel. Columbia , MO: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Pp. 226 With the establishment of African American Studies programs and departments in the late 1960s and early 1970s on the campuses of American colleges and universities, the canon of African American literature, in existence since the time of slavery and an integral component of the African American sociopolitical mission of racial uplift, was reinvented. Critical canon-forming studies by Houston A. Bakers, Jr., Robert Stepto, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Valerie Smith, and others narrowed the study of African American literature to a few selected texts such as Frederick Douglass’ Narrative, Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Native Son, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and others. These canonical texts were read and interpreted to protest racial oppression and to chart the journey of the African American from the subaltern to the values of mainstream American society. Certainly, black women critics such as Mary Helen Washington, Barbara Christian, Hortense Spillers, Hazel Carby, Claudia Tate, and Deborah McDowell immediately protested and challenged the exclusion of black women writers from this reinvented canon. But it has taken some time for advocates of other repressed and excluded African American literary traditions and genres to challenge this narrow representation of African American literature. Only recently (since the 1990s) have other African American critics such as Claudia Tate in Psychoanalysis and the Black Novel, Ann DuCille in Coupling, Alton Lynn Nielsen in Black Chant: Languages of African American Postmodernism, and Yemisi Jimoh in Living in Paradox: Reading Music in African American Fiction focused on the repressed and excluded African American literary traditions. Darryl Dickson-Carr’s African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel uses satire to reformulate the historical mission of African American criticism. Although he examines issues of racism and social equality and engages the issue of African American representation, he also shows how satire conceptualizes these issues differently. Dickson-Carr’s African American Satire is the first fulllength , historical study of African American satire; and it is seminal. It is a fresh critical voice that challenges the reinvented canon of the seventies and eighties. It Canadian Review of American Studies 31 (2001) 202 “places African American satirical novels back into the centers of our conceptions of black literature and culture”(8). In focusing on “the way satire operates in the context of African American literature and culture”(1), Professor Dickson-Carr brings critical attention to texts that have “either suffered from varying degrees of obscurity or have been analyzed in ways that minimize the important role satire plays within these pages”(1). In making salient the satirical tradition in African American fiction, Dickson-Carr is returning a polyvalent nature to African American literature. The presence of this satirical tradition allows the coexistence of different African American modes of literature in one social and cultural present. African American Satire establishes brilliantly a satiric tradition that first manifested itself in African American folklore, folk culture, and vernacular discourse – elements of central importance to the production of African American literature. In terms of African American literature and satire, the tradition begins, according to Dickson-Carr, in the margins of the slave narratives and political commentaries of Douglass’s Narrative, William Wells Brown’s Clotel, Frances E. W. Harper’s poetry, David Walker’s Appeal, Charles Chesnutt’s short stories, and becomes the central focus in Harlem Renaissance writers such as George Schuyler (Black No More), Rudolph Fisher (The Walls of Jericho), Wallace Thurman (Infants of the Spring), Zora Neale Hurston (Moses, Man of the Mountain), and Langston Hughes (the Jesse B. Semple stories). According to DicksonCarr , this tradition acquires sophistication and maturity between the 1950s and 1970s, with a new crop of black satirists such as John O. Killens, Douglas Turner Ward, William Melvin Kelley, Ishmael Reed, and Cecil Brown. Darryl Dickson-Carr ends his study in the 1990s with succinct and innovative...