Published fall 2020
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Laughing to keep from dying
African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century
How African Americans have infused satire with a potent new dimension
By subverting comedy's rules and expectations, African American satire promotes social justice by connecting laughter with ethical beliefs in a revolutionary way. Danielle Fuentes Morgan ventures from Suzan-Lori Parks to Leslie Jones and Dave Chappelle to Get Out and Atlanta to examine the satirical treatment of race and racialization across today's African American culture. Morgan analyzes how African American artists highlight the ways that society racializes people and bolsters the powerful myth that we live in a "post-racial" nation. The latter in particular inspires artists to take aim at the idea racism no longer exists or the laughable notion of Americans "not seeing" racism or race. Their critique changes our understanding of the boundaries between staged performance and lived experience and create ways to better articulate Black selfhood.
Adventurous and perceptive, Laughing to Keep from Dying reveals how African American satirists unmask the illusions and anxieties surrounding race in the twenty-first century.
"Exceedingly well-written, well-researched . . . Recommended." --Choice
"In Laughing to Keep from Dying, Danielle Fuentes Morgan crafts an innovative and well-considered account of African-American satire. . . . Morgan's prose is clear and engaging, and her language accessible and compelling." --Journal of American Culture
"A satisfying read for anyone with an interest in how entertainment responds to a shifting social landscape. " --Atlantic
"Many comics hone their craft primarily to amuse, but with this thoughtful, academic work, Morgan explores the idea of Black satire with an added function: to more or less safely rock the boat, expressing ideas that might otherwise be tuned out or provoke uncomfortable or even dangerous backlash." --Library Journal
"Morgan explores a radical impulse in recent Black comedy, arguing that performers like Dave Chappelle or films like 'Get Out' aim to highlight racial boundaries." --New York Times
"Danielle Fuentes Morgan's Laughing to Keep from Dying is a major contribution to African American literary and cultural studies and to the study of satire and other forms of humor in the United States. Taking as her focus satirical texts in the twenty-first century, Morgan argues that recent African American satirical works reassert an ethical position present in black cultural expressions since slavery, that literature and art instantiate a humanity that its authors perennially assume to be a matter of fact. But rather than positing respectability politics, contemporary African American satire advocates a 'kaleidoscopic blackness,' one that embraces the many subtle and subversive ways that black people make meaning. Contemporary African American satire, as the title indicates, is more than a salve for oppression; its purpose is to keep black people from dying. In this stunning debut, Morgan places herself in the company of Glenda Carpio, Terrence Tucker, and most recently Lisa Guerrero." --Darryl Dickson-Carr, author of Spoofing the Modern: Satire in the Harlem Renaissance
"Danielle Fuentes Morgan attunes readers to the variable registers and resonances of Black laughter in the present moment. Examining a wide range of media, from novels and television series to standup comedy and performance art, Morgan shows how the satirical impulse in Black cultural production expresses not only collective histories of subversion but individual practices of survival. A bold account of humor’s capacity to traverse the realms of sociality and interiority, Laughing to Keep from Dying is a model of Black study for the twenty-first century." --Kinohi Nishikawa, author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground
Journal Publications
“Song as Shadow and Substance in Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’ and Stew’s Passing Strange.” In College Literature. Fall 2020.
“The Queer of Color and AIDS Performance at the End of the Millennium.” In Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory. Ed. Jacqueline Rhodes. Winter 2019.
“Visible Black Motherhood is a Revolution.” In Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. Eds. Brittney C. Cooper and Treva B. Lindsey. Fall 2018.
“Looking Forward, Looking Back: Afrofuturism and Black Histories in Neo-Slave Narration.” In Journal of Science Fiction. Summer 2018.
“Post What?: The Liminality of Multi-Racial Identity.” In Humanities. Ed. Myra Mendible. Summer 2016.
Book Chapters
“Forbidding Mourning: Disrupted Sites of Memory and the Tupac Shakur Hologram.” In The Specter and the Speculative: Afterlives and Archives in the African Diaspora. Eds. Mae Henderson and Jeanne Scheper, Rutgers University Press. 2024.
“‘It’s a Simulation, Van’: Atlanta, The Twilight Zone, and the Uncanniness of Black Womanhood.” In Greater Atlanta. Eds. James D. Donahue and Derek C. Maus. University Press of Mississippi. 2024.
“Reframing and Reappropriating Blackness in 1980s Satire.” In African American Literature in Transition, 1980-1990. Eds. Rich Blint and D. Quentin Miller. Series Ed. Joycelyn Moody. Cambridge University Press. 2023.
“‘It’s a Black Thang Maybe’: Satirical Blackness in Percival Everett’s Erasure and Adam Mansbach’s Angry Black White Boy.” In Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights. Eds. James J. Donahue and Derek Maus. University Press of Mississippi. 2014.
other Selected Writing
It was the “anti” that caught my eye when I scanned the course catalog – “Anti-Fifties: Voices of a Counter-Decade.” In the spring of 2005, I was a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’d signed up for Dr. Robert Cantwell’s American Studies course on a whim…
Oct 2023
VULTURE, DAVE CHAPPELLE THE COMEDY RELIC
After a decade of teaching Chappelle’s comedy to college students, a professor comes to terms with the fading relevance of the one-time GOAT.
Oct 2021
POST45 CONTEMPORARIES, “AFRICAN AMERICAN SATIRE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY”
Edited and Introduction by Danielle Fuentes Morgan
Jun 2021
How the Covid-19 pandemic brings the uncanniness of horror movies to our daily lives
May 2020
AL JAZEERA, STOP TELLING ME TO GET OVER SLAVERY…
…when you can’t get over monuments to slavers.
Aug 2017
AL JAZEERA, WHY WE STILL NEED BLACK HISTORY MONTH IN THE US
In an ideal world, Black History Month wouldn’t be necessary. But we don’t live in one.
Feb 2017
AL JAZEERA, OBAMA AND BLACK LIVES MATTER: AN EPILOGUE
Why Obama did not do enough for Black Lives Matter.
Jan 2017