ABSTRACT
The introduction presents the cultural context(s) of late 20th- and 21st-century black satire and defines the critical framework used to consider contemporary black satiric forms. It focuses on the terms and concepts that provide the foundation for the analyses that make up the main chapters of the book, including discussions of racial madness, adaptive disintegration, and black satiric epistemology. The introduction defines the site and quality of black racial traumas at work in 21st-century black cultural production. It maps the theoretical arguments that are parts of the analytic lens used to consider how the intersections of race, mental illness, capitalism, and culture are displayed in contemporary black satire. Bringing together the scholarship of various thinkers in black cultural and literary studies, and trauma and affect theory, I propose a different lens that emphasizes the psychological and affective character of black satire through which to critically unpack the layers of contemporary black satire and reassess its cultural and social impacts beyond comedy and consumption. It finishes by defining black racial madness and the black satiric epistemological approach toward understanding the significance of this racially specific madness as a site of both black subject formation and black resistance.
