First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Postcolonial Satire: Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire positions postcolonial South Asian satiric fiction in both the cutting-edge territory of political resistance writing and the ancient tradition of Menippean satire. Postcolonial Satire aims to disrupt the relationship between postcolonial literature and magic realism, by discussing the work of writers such as G. V. Desani, Aubrey Menen, Salman Rushdie, and Irwin Allan Sealy as one movement into the entirely subversive realm of satire. Indian fiction, and the fiction of other colonized cultures, can be re-construed through the lens of satire as openly critical of a broad spectrum of political and cultural issues. Employing the strengths of postcolonial theory and criticism, Postcolonial Satire expands upon the postcolonial works of these authors by analyzing them as satire, rather than magical realism with satirical elements.

This book, new in paperback, offers new readings of novels by major British and American postwar novelists.

From 30 Americans to Angry White Boy, from Bamboozled to The Boondocks, from Chappelle's Show to The Colored Museum, this collection of twenty-one essays takes an interdisciplinary look at the flowering of satire and its influence in defining new roles in black identity. As a mode of expression for a generation of writers, comedians, cartoonists, musicians, filmmakers, and visual/conceptual artists, satire enables collective questioning of many of the fundamental presumptions about black identity in the wake of the civil rights movement. Whether taking place in popular and controversial television shows, in a provocative series of short internet films, in prize-winning novels and plays, in comic strips, or in conceptual hip-hop albums, this satirical impulse has found a receptive audience both within and outside the black community. Such works have been variously called “post-black,” “post-soul,” and examples of a “New Black Aesthetic.” Whatever the label, this collection bears witness to a noteworthy shift regarding the ways in which African American satirists feel constrained by conventional obligations when treating issues of racial identity, historical memory, and material representation of blackness. Among the artists examined in this collection are Paul Beatty, Dave Chappelle, Trey Ellis, Percival Everett, Donald Glover (a.k.a. Childish Gambino), Spike Lee, Aaron McGruder, Lynn Nottage, ZZ Packer, Suzan Lori-Parks, Mickalene Thomas, Touré, Kara Walker, and George C. Wolfe. The essays intentionally seek out interconnections among various forms of artistic expression. Contributors look at the ways in which contemporary African American satire engages in a broad ranging critique that exposes fraudulent, outdated, absurd, or otherwise damaging mindsets and behaviors both within and outside the African American community.

This is the first extended, English-language study to focus exclusively on the fiction of Juan Rulfo in over twenty years, analyzing a selection of short stories from Rulfo's collection and also two of the main characters of hismasterpiece, Pedro Páramo. This is the first extended, English-language study to focus exclusively on the fiction of Juan Rulfo in over twenty years. It contains innovative analyses of a selection of short stories from Rulfo's collection, El llano en llamas (1953). It also examines in great depth two of the main characters of Pedro Páramo (1955), Rulfo's masterpiece and only novel. The book shows how Rulfo's works can be read as exercises in irony directed againstthe rhetoric of post-Revolutionary Mexican governments. It also demonstrates the relevance of certain legacies of colony in Rulfo's use of irony. Successive Mexican governments promoted a vision of post-Revolutionary society founded on specific notions of ethnicity, family, nation, education, religion and rural politics. The author combines examination of the speeches, images and newspaper articles which disseminated this vision with incisive literary analyses of Rulfo's work. These analyses are informed both by his original theory of irony, based on "internal" and "external" referents, and by existing postcolonial theories, particularly those of Homi K. Bhabha. Amit Thakkar is a Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Lancaster University.

Examining postcolonial transcultural practice from a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, this study seeks to analyse laughter and the postcolonial in their complexity. It gathers a group of international specialists in postcolonial transcultural studies to analyse the functions of humour in a wide range of cultural texts.

Satire plays a prominent and often controversial role in postcolonial fiction. Satire and the Postcolonial Novel offers the first study of this topic, employing the insights of postcolonial comparative theories to revisit Western formulations of "satire" and the "satiric." Through the varying lenses provided by satire's relation to irony, allegory, narrative, and the grotesque, this book offers new readings of important novels by V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad), Chinua Achebe (Nigeria) and Salman Rushdie (India. It presents a detailed study of the complex and multidirectional ways satire has engaged with the history and messy aftermath of empire.