Forced Laughter and Rehearsal in Black Political Fiction

• In Event: Black Aesthetics and the Political Imagination

Abstract

This paper examines forced (“canned”) laughter as a technology of political organization in Imperium in Imperio by Sutton Griggs (1899) and The Black Cat Club by James Corrothers (1902). In both texts, Black men in all-Black political communities perform solidarity by laughing in unison—what Sara Ahmed calls the “injunction to be happy.” I read these scenes as rehearsals in which belonging is produced through reciprocal affect, monopolized attention, and aesthetic attraction. Laughter coordinates priorities within organizations otherwise still learning how to move together.
Situating the novels alongside records from the National Afro-American Council, which dissolved in 1907, the paper traces turn-of-the-century skepticism about forging a unified Black political program that could represent collective Black consciousness, sustain street-level action, and preserve individual belief systems. Indoctrinating rituals of laughter stage anxieties about consensus-building. These texts render political coordination as uneven, experimental performance—how collective feeling is organized before agreement is secured.

Biographical Information

Amadi Ozier is a scholar of Black diasporic literature whose work examines humor through psychoanalysis, performance studies, Black capitalism, and cultural history. They are developing a book on “uppity humor” in Black middle-class writing at the turn of the twentieth century. Their scholarship appears in Social Text, Modernism/modernity, Early American Literature, and several Oxford reference volumes.

Author

• amadi I ozier, University of Wisconsin, Madison