2 SUNY Potsdam English Professors “Greater Atlanta: Black Satire After Obama” published

POTSDAM, N.Y. (WWTI) – Professors Dr. Derek C. Maus and Dr. James J. Donahue, two faculty members from SUNY Potsdam’s Department of English , have teamed up to co-edit a collection of scholarly essays about contemporary African American literature and popular culture, it’s been ten years since their first book-length collaboration.

The pair co-edited “Greater Atlanta: Black Satire After Obama,” which was published by the University Press of Mississippi on April 23 and is now available in hardcover, paperback and eBook versions.

“ This project began as a way to manage the stresses of the early months of the pandemic ,” said Maus. “ In those spare moments when we weren’t teaching online or trying to find a store that had toilet paper and hand-sanitizer for sale, we were both re-watching the first two seasons of ‘Atlanta’ for comic relief. Before long, we realized that we might have stumbled upon the follow-up to our previous collection and by May of 2020 we had a contract for it .”

The new publication builds on “Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights,” which was published in 2014 , also by the University Press of Mississippi. The first book featured essays that examined how a generation of African American artists who came of age after the Civil Rights Movement have used satire to express themselves. The new collection focuses more closely on creative works that have appeared in the years after the sense of “hope and change” surrounding Barack Obama’s election as president faded.

“ Although we’re both huge fans of the show, we didn’t want the book to be just about ‘Atlanta ,'” said Donahue. “ We instead were looking for essays that considered how the show is a perfect example of a more general shift within African American satire. Everywhere we looked, we saw stuff coming out that fit this new mold, so we wanted to think about why that was happening .”

The 17 essays in “Greater Atlanta” survey over a dozen novels, films and television shows that together reveal the ways in which contemporary Black satire has largely dispensed with satire’s presumed expectations of social reform and instead offers an exasperated self-affirmation that echoes the declaration that Black Lives Matter.

The collection has already been favorably reviewed by Publisher’s Weekly.

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