The Republic

Chukwuka Odigbo'25 cites research by professors Ayo Coly and Kimberly Juanita Brown in an opinion piece calling for the end of jokes at the expense of African mothers.

In her book Postcolonial Hauntologies: African Women's Discourses of the Female Body, Ayo Coly, a professor of Comparative Literature and African Studies at Dartmouth College, identifies how modes of thinking about and depicting the Black female body during colonial times have endured into the postcolonial present. I interpret this enduring legacy in three ways: one, a difficulty in engaging with the sexual agency of the Black female body, even by feminist writers; two, a tendency for postcolonial realities to attempt to 'cover up' or redignify the Black female body, as seen in anti-nakedness laws in African nation states; and three, the use of the Black female body as object and punchline, not as subject. This third interpretation is most crucial given that the skits I am critiquing rely on tropes of African parents in order to be found funny. Coly's analysis works hand in hand with another scholar, Kimberly Juanita Brown, a professor of English and Creative Writing. Brown's term, 'mortevivum', explains how Black life is represented in photography. She notes: 'Mortevivum is a term I have come up with to understand a particular photographic phenomenon: the hyperavailability of images in the media that traffic in tropes of impending black death.' I would extend 'death' to encompass all the ways Black life is depicted negatively in photography: despair, backwardness, flatness, suffering. Brown continues: 'These tropes…make any tragedy, any crisis, an opportunity for viewers to find pleasure in Black people's pain.' 

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