Currently Out Of Stock
To be real
Paperback
€40.59
Collect 121 Reward Points
- Currently Out Of Stock
- Book Synopsis
- To Be Real: Truth and Racial Authenticity in African American Standup Comedy examines Black standup comedy over the past decade as a stage for understanding why notions of racial authenticity--in essence, appeals to "realness" and "real Blackness"--emerge as a cultural imperative in African American culture. Ethnographic observations and interviews with Black comedians ground this telling, providing a narrative arc of key historical moments in the new millennium. Readers will understand how and why African American comics invoke "realness" to qualify nationalist 9/11 discourses and grapple with the racial entailments of the war, overcome a sense of racial despair in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, critique Michael Richards' ["Kramer's"] notorious rant at The Laugh Factory and subsequent attempts to censor their use of the n-word, and reconcile the politics of a "real" in their own and other Black folks' everyday lives. Additionally, readers will hear through audience murmurs, hisses, and boos how beliefs about racial authenticity are intensely class-wrought and fraught. Moreover, they will appreciate how context remains ever critical to when and why African American comics and audiences lobby for and/or lampoon jokes that differentiate the "real" from the "fake" or "Black folks" from so-called "niggahs." Context and racial vulnerability are critical to understanding how and why allusions to "racial authenticity" persist in the African American comedic and cultural imagination.
- About The Author
- Lanita Jacobs is an Associate Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her recent research examines constructions of race in popular culture.
- Product Details
-
- ISBN
- 9780190870089
- Format
- Paperback
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press, (21 December 2022)
- Number of Pages
- 208
- Weight
- 318 grams
- Language
- English
- Dimensions
- 157 x 218 x 20.3 mm
- Series:
- See all books in this series
- Categories: