"Honey, Hush!": Toward A Diasporic Analysis of Black Women’s Literary Humor

Introduction

We use our humor to speak the unspeakable, to mask the attack, to get a tricky subject on the table, to warn of lines not to be crossed, to strike out at enemies and the hateful acts of friends and family, to camouflage sensitivity, to tease, to compliment, to berate, to brag, to flirt, to speculate, to gossip, to educate, to correct th lies people tel lon us, to bring about change. Ultimately, we realize, as Toni Morrison has written..., "that laughter is serious. More complicated, more serious than tears. ~Daryl Cumber Dance

Project Background
This project stems from my interest in theorizing and analyzing Black women's literary humor from a diasporic perspective, an interest that I hope to develop into my doctoral dissertation. My goal is to examine contemporary African American, Black British, and Anglophone Caribbean literary texts that are either written by or feature prominent depictions of Black women and that employ humor as a narrative and discursive strategy. Specifically, I will focus on humorous depictions of Black women as well as deployments of humor by Black women writers in contemporary literature across the diaspora, analyzing uses of humor, irony, satire, and laughter. Ultimately, I hope to identify and discuss the significance of Black women's humor not simply as a reactive response to racial and gendered oppression across the diaspora, but as a literary and rhetorical mode of self-fashioning and community-building--a creative, generative meaning-making force in itself.

The diasporic scope of my analysis requires an understanding of the various streams of African diasporic literary theory. One such stream, that of Black Atlantic studies, has been the focus of this graduate seminar on 18th-century British literature. Our early readings in the course were comprised of classical texts of Black Atlantic theory, including Paul Gilroy's seminal 1993 text, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, and primary texts invited analyses of depictions of race, gender, cultural identity, and the intersections thereof in England and the New World during the long 18th century. Although my dissertation project will focus on the contemporary moment rather than the 18th century, my aim of theorizing Black women’s humor from a diasporic perspective will require close engagement with Black Atlantic literary and cultural theory and a keen understanding of the Black Atlantic's foundational role in the development of the modern world. Thus, this particular project, entitled "Honey, Hush! Toward A Diasporic Analysis of Black Women’s Literary Humor," constitutes a necessary first step in developing a sound theoretical foundation for my dissertation. The project brings together scholarship and criticism that defines, expands, critiques, and challenges the idea of the Black Atlantic as a theoretical, cultural, and geopolitical entity. Compiling an organized digital listing of these texts using the Scalar platform is undoubtedly useful for my own academic purposes, but the project also serves as a kind of #syllabus that is available to the public as an open-source web document, allowing other students, scholars, and interested persons to make connections between various articulations of Black Atlantic theories as well as responses to and applications of those theories. 

In addition to compiling information about theoretical texts relevant to Black Atlantic literary analysis, this project also includes texts on humor across the diaspora, which will allow me to begin to think about the ways in which a Black Atlantic approach is (and isn't) useful for an analysis of Black women's literary humor. This area of analysis is a fruitful one, since a dearth of scholarship analyzes Black women's humor as a diasporic phenomenon and literary strategy.  The quotation above is taken from Dance's collection Honey, Hush! An Anthology of African American Women's Humor, currently the only book-length text dedicated to African American women's humor. No such texts exist for Black British or Caribbean women's humor (nor for African women's humor, which I have noted even though the literature of the continent is beyond the scope of my project). Furthermore, although the genealogy of Black literary humor is a rich one, comprising several wide-ranging collections, anthologies, and, more recently, critical analyses extending back to the early 20th century, the overwhelming majority of texts that collect or discuss Black literary humor are written by men. As Dana A. Williams notes in the edited collection African American Humor, Irony, and Satire: Ishmael Reed, Satirically Speaking, this disparity is indicative of “the work that is yet to be done on women who work in the traditions of humor, irony, and satire" (3).

Project Limitations
In addition to the usual culprits of limited time and an adequate-but-far-from-expert level facility with the Scalar platform, this project is limited by my inability to access a number of texts due to the inaccessibility of library resources due to campus COVID-19 closures. I deliberately limited the texts included in this project to those that I have either read or skimmed. As a result, I am aware of several texts that could be included but are not. It is my hope to continue to develop this project by adding relevant texts as they become available to me. 

Project Structure
This Scalar book contains a single path that incorporates 2 related tags which represent the two main topics covered by this project: Black Atlantic Theory and Black Literary Humor. Each tag leads to a page that contains both a visual path and a numbered list of the tagged texts. Each tagged text in turn leads to a page containing a full citation and a brief summary of the text's main argument and/or critical contribution to the relevant topic. The listed texts may be reviewed in chronological order based on date of publication or explored randomly using the visual path. Whatever the method chosen, it is my hope that viewers will peruse these pages while meditating on the diasporic reach of the following sentiment, taken from Nikki Giovanni's forward to the groundbreaking collection that gives this project it's name:
 
..we find a way to laugh because we know that the only way to win this battle of life and liberty is with the pursuit of happiness. We find a way to get together with our green beans that need breaking or our dried beans that need picking through; our soaps for washing hair and hot combs for getting the kinks out; our files to smooth out fingernails or calluses on our feet and we talk about the world and how it won't defeat us. No way. 'Cause we start with that belly laugh and tears roll down our cheeks; we throw up our hands and all is right with the world. Who wouldn't want to be a Black woman knowing nothing can defeat the indomitably spirit that is determined to love and laugh? Who can help but be a fan of the greatest, most wonderful creature on the planet? And when things are not going well with you, why not gather a few friends, fry a chicken or two and sit around a table saying: "I am a Black woman. I am the best thing on Earth." Then laughing your foolish head off. Yeah. We're wonderful. Honey, Hush!




 

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