The Satire of the New Black Renaissance: Open-Source Blackness

How do twenty-first century Black satirists rewrite American ideas of race? This book plunges into the New Black Renaissance – a flowering of the 2000s and 2010s African American culture – and argues that its most potent tool is anti-essentialist satire. The study traces what Baratunde Thurston calls “Open-source Blackness,” an ethos that prizes individuality, inclusivity, and remix. To map this new terrain, this volume offers close readings of three signature works: Percival Everett’s metafictional Erasure, Justin Simien’s campus satire Dear White People, and Thurston’s own multimedia endeavors – his memoir How to Be Black and the playful software experiments developed under the auspices of his company, Cultivated Wit. Together, these texts show how literature, film, and technology fracture worn stereotypes and invite broader co-creation of (non-)racial identity. The result is the first sustained academic account of Open-source Blackness – of interest to students and scholars in literary, media, and cultural studies.