Touré on Post Blackness in the `Chappele Show`

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, University of Frankfurt (Main) (Institut für England- und Amerikatsudien), course: American Fiction After Race?, language: English, abstract: This paper looks at the aspect of Post-Blackness in the Chappelle Show. The theory Post-Blackness was made popular by Touré who published "Whos Afraid of Post-Blackness." Chapelles Show was an American sketch comedy series viewed from 2003 to 2005. It looked at race and social relations in todays America. The shows controversy makes it worth being the subject of this paper. In the following, its aspects of Post-Blackness are being discussed. Tourés "Whos afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now" will be the main source of this paper, for it especially wants to carve out Tourès understanding of Post-Blackness. This paper aims to portrait the different ways of Blackness visible today. This new approach of Blackness is represented best in the TV Show Chapelles Show. Therefore two skits examined in the chapter The Rise and Fall of a Post-Black King, in Tourés book Whos afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now will be used to illustrate, why the Chapelles Show is a post-Black TV show. This paper also tries to present the controversy, about the appreciation of Blackness itself. The following quote by Melissa Harris-Perry, who is a professor for Politics at Princeton University, tries to emphasize that she cannot really believe in the lack of acceptance, of different ways of being Black among African-Americans.