Satirical writing takes aim at the moral failures of the powerful by exposing them to ridicule or scorn; it ranges from gently humorous to scathing. This course looks at the issue of race and satire mainly through novels but complemented and expanded on by film, televison, and web material in order to examine how satire both exposes inequalities and (often backhandedly) offers a vision of a better world. Here the targets are the colonization of Indigenous people in North America in Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water (1994); the Vietnam War in Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer (2016); the representation of Chinese Americans in Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown (2020), and African American experience in the U.S. in Paul Beatty's The Sellout (2016). We'll look at how these works relate to the history of satire in the U.S. and Canada, how they relate to similar kinds of contemporary works globally, and what satirical writing allows you to say that other forms don't, or don't as well. We'll also spend some time thinking about when satire goes wrong, especially today, as its effectiveness depends on who's mocking who, how, and when. Satire is thus more complicated than it might at first appear.

This course satisfies the Diversity Intensive requirement for students in the College of Arts and Sciences by focusing on the ways in which these writers use satire to examine political, social, and cultural issues, including colonization, imperialism, and race relations in the U.S. It asks why and how satire is an effective means of critiquing these complex phenomena and how the works of these North American writers relate to contemporary global literatures. Assignments include quizzes, discussion boards, four brief response papers, and one final paper.