We are soliciting book chapters for a volume under contract with Oxford University Press, The Oxford Handbook of African American Humor Studies. 

Edited by: Dr. Brittney Michelle Edmonds (University of Wisconsin) and Dr. Danielle Fuentes Morgan (Santa Clara University)

African American humor studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines the cultural production, performance, reception, social circulation, and quotidian expression of African American humor. We understand African American humor to be a foundational element to African American expressive cultures, and our volume will trace its influence by emphasizing its singular historical emergence, its multivalent sophistication, and its rhetorical density. Developed within the context of institutionalized chattel slavery and de jure Black subordination, African American humor emerged simultaneously as a complex political strategy and a flexible social instrument. That a canny humorist might play into dominant stereotyped notions of African American witlessness, if only to fool those who would otherwise thwart their desired ends, captures a central paradox of African American humor: African Americans, long caricatured and grotesquely stereotyped by dominant culture, found in humor a resource to not only speak back to dehumanizing distortions and representations, but also to create space for seemingly impossible practices of freedom in both de jure and de facto contexts. To that end, The Oxford Handbook of African American Humor Studies attends to African American humor as a discrete set of artistic practices that formalize across traditional comedic genres and as a more elusive but no less potent cultural strategy underlying much of African American culture.

Formal and disciplinary methods will vary, but chapters should proceed from the understanding of African American humor as a polyvocal mode of expression that unsettles discursive fixity and follows cultural historian Mel Watkins’s observation that African American humor practices historically evolved into two predominant modes—one that served in-group audiences, one that served out-group ones. 

We aim for a mixture of historical accounts, methodological and theoretical case studies, and critical overviews of existing and emergent scholarship. Our goal is to make the volume accessible, while offering a diverse array of readers a useful tool through which to learn the broad parameters of the discipline. We are especially interested in abstracts on topics including: 

• Blackface and Bert Williams

• Comics/cartoons/visual arts

• Music and musical comedy

• 19th-century African American literature and folk cultures

• African American theater and the use of humor

• Internet and digital media cultures and the use of humor

Submissions should be sent to oxfordafamhumor@gmail.com and include an abstract of 250 words or less and a tentative title by May 1, 2023. The final essay will be submitted by March 1, 2024.