Thomas Rainbow (KCL) - 2025-26 Students
thomas.rainbow@kcl.ac.uk

'Bootleg Fiction': A Long History of Satire in Black American Literature

My project examines the role and significance of satire in Black American literature. My research is periodised into three points of American history that saw the emergence of popular antiracism movements, from abolitionism in the nineteenth-century to the Black Lives Matter movement of the twenty-first century. While these movements attracted widespread support from liberal Americans, their popularity also reinforced racial categories and promote an ‘essentialist’ view of race. I argue that the genre of satire has offered Black American authors an experimental form in order to problematise the idea of an ‘authentic’ Black literary voice, and confound the workings of racialisation more broadly.

Principal supervisor: Dr Edward Sugden