Brittney M. Edmonds
UW–Madison Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Resident Fellow (2025-2026)
Assistant Professor, Department of African American Studies, UW–Madison
Who’s Laughing Now?: Black Experimental Satire and the Aesthetics of Decipherment
In Who’s Laughing Now?: Black Experimental Satire and the Aesthetics of Decipherment, I trace a genealogy of Black experimental satire from the 1960s to the present, arguing that this strain of Black experimentalism enacts satire as a method: as a critical praxis, philosophical orientation, and epistemological tool. Historically cast as a minor or oppositional form, satire emerges in this project as a central technique through which Black writers interrogate and revise the conditions that make race legible. In their deployment of formal strategies like ventriloquism, ontological confusion, multi-layered irony, grotesque caricature, and genre inversion, Black satirists disrupt the racialized logics that inhere in literary form itself.
Who’s Laughing Now? is a synthesis of archival research, formal analysis, and literary history that offers original readings of novels by William Melvin Kelley, John Oliver Killens, Charles Wright, Fran Ross, Carlene Hatcher Polite, Ishmael Reed, and others. The project demonstrates how Black experimental satire unsettles dominant epistemologies and invites readers into acts of decipherment that fundamentally alters the historical relationship between audience and Black text. By engaging key sites of literary authority, including the academy, the marketplace, and the racialized conventions of US literary history, the project additionally reframes satire as a generative, insurgent practice that expands the possibilities of authorship, critique, and cultural expression developed under conditions of constraint.
Brittney M. Edmonds is an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research focuses on Black literary and cultural production after 1945, with special attention to African American satire, humor, and the political work of literary form. Her writing has appeared in journals such as American Literary History, African American Review, MELUS, and Post45: Contemporaries, among others. She is co-editing two forthcoming projects: The Oxford Handbook of African American Humor Studies (with Danielle Fuentes Morgan) and a special issue of African American Review titled “Black Literature+: Reading African American Literature in Dialogue with the Other Arts” (with Hayley O’Malley). Dr. Edmonds’s scholarship has been supported by fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the UW–Madison Institute for Research in the Humanities. Beyond her academic work, she contributes to public-facing scholarship through podcasting on the New Books Network and holds leadership roles in several professional organizations. At UW–Madison, she teaches courses on African American literature, Black feminist theory, and the long and rich tradition of Black humor and performance.
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