Kimberley A. Yates

A native Washingtonian and graduate of Sidwell Friends, Spelman College (Atlanta, GA), and University of Cape Town (South Africa), I am currently a 5th-year PhD candidate in dissertation phase here in GW’s American Studies PhD program. My dissertation, tentatively titled “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Or Will It?” examines three shows in particular, The Richard Pryor Show, which aired in 1977 on NBC, Chappelle’s Show on Comedy Central from 2003-2005, and The Boondocks on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim from 2006 to the present. In this project, I analyze the ways in which four Black male humorists – Richard Pryor, Paul Mooney, Dave Chappelle, and Aaron McGruder – have used the medium of television as both a cultural and countercultural tool to articulate a Black nationalism reflected in their respective artistic movements in the United States from 1965 to the present, specifically the Black Arts Movement and hip hop.

One of the project’s purposes is to raise the stakes on the significance of these humorists’ work, of hip hop, and of the Black Arts Movement, in this society. If we understand hip hop as the legacy and fruition of specific Black Arts Movement values, it opens pathways to think about the Movement’s successes beyond what seems to be its rather infamous and unfortunate death so well documented and lamented, and to think about Black nationalism’s shaping of U.S. democratic ideals. The point is to historicize the cultural work of their comedy and place them along a difficult continuum of Black nationalism complicated by histories of Black men and their performances in front of White audience members. This requires thinking through racially gendered posturings, i.e. the ways in which they articulate (verbally and physically) Black manhood and how that performance conveys their ideals of Black masculinity. So, in this project, I focus on intention. The argument is that these humorists move in a tradition of revolutionary humor characterized by their use of comic artistry not to reinforce minstrel images but to move beyond a simplified minstrel-vs.-radical binary reserved for Black male entertainers. I am fascinated by the ways in which they have already used television and this revolutionary humor to simultaneously challenge and re-shape mainstream thought. In other words, on a big picture scale, I am looking at the ways in which Black nationalism has come to affect and realize U.S. democratic ideals.

I completed my three comprehensive exams in the summer of 2006 in 1) cultural theories of power, identity, and imperialism; 2) 20th Century Black writing and “revolutionary” thought in the United States; and 3) broad social/cultural histories of race in the United States from contact to the present.

I completed my M.A. in Literary Studies at University of Cape Town in South Africa with a thesis entitled “In Search of Blackwoman When ‘The Man’ Got You Down,” which examines the autobiographical works of three Black South African activist women writers connected to the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) to see how they addressed and lived with the masculine discourse of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), articulated in terms of "the Black man" and his struggle. My scholarship generally rotates around intersections having to do with social relationships of power, particularly race, gender, sex, and class.

During the course of this degree program, I’ve also managed to present at the fourth biennial Conference of the Toni Morrison Society a paper entitled, “Land of the Free, Home of the Slave” on landscape and nature imagery in Beloved; present at this department’s first graduate organized conference, “Collected Stories” another Toni Morrison paper, “Violent Silences: Toni Morrison, the Black Arts Movement, Tar Baby, and Son,”; write an essay entitled, “Dave Chappelle: When ‘Keepin’ It Real’ Goes Right” to be published in the forthcoming collection Meaning, Identity, and the Comedy of Dave Chappelle, edited by K.A. Wisniewski under McFarland and Co publishers; and do an encyclopedia entry on Dave Chappelle to be published in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Muslim American History by Edward E. Curtis IV. In the Spring semester of 2008 I taught my own AMST seminar, “Post WW-II U.S. Race and Comedy.” I am currently a Letitia Woods Brown Fellow as I was my first year. My second year I was a research assistant on a joint project between GW’s Center for Public History and the National Park Service, spearheaded by Prof. Jim Horton, about presentations of race and slavery at Harpers Ferry. I have been a GTA to Chad Heap for his undergraduate course on the history of sexuality in the U.S. and to Terry Murphy for her introductory survey course in American Studies.

coconutnine@yahoo.com