In the five decades since the publication of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), the satirical mode of discourse has arguably been more prominent in American popular culture than at any point in the nation’s history. Although the 1960s produced innumerable exemplary satires in various genres, the subsequent decades feature an even greater density of significant works that express political, social, and cultural criticisms through the absurdism, parody, polyvocality, and other distinctive characteristics of the satirical mode. Mumbo Jumbo both indicates and accelerates the predominance of what Steven Weisenburger identifies as a "degenerative" satirical mode that fundamentally reorients the nature of both American literature generally and African American literature specifically. Contemporary African American satire remains a literature of dissent, even though it seemingly bears scant relation to either midcentury “protest novels” or the wide range of “uplift” narratives common to both the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. In the hands of African American authors, degenerative satire is intensely skeptical of a wide range of ideologies that have contributed to the construction, representation, and (de)valuation of blackness as both an individual and collective identity in the contemporary United States.

The recent work of philosopher Tommy J. Curry in the nascent field of Black Male Studies has brought rigorous attention to racialized misandry, framing Black maleness as a site of racial-sexual victimhood, vulnerability, and violence. This essay deploys Curry’s framework of “the man-not” in order to examine how anti-Black misandry is explored in Ishmael Reed’s Reckless Eyeballing (1986) and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy: An American Memoir (2018). Reed and Laymon each thematize anti-Blackness in the contemporary period specifically through the ontology of anti-Black misandry. The essay outlines the possibilities of a counter-ontological surplus within the abjection of Black manhood, which Laymon describes as the “abundance” designated by Black maleness in an anti-Black world. The essay concludes with a discussion of how Black Male Studies may be understood within recent thought trends regarding Black sexuality and gender studies, as well as within the Ontological Turn in Black Studies.