Amadi Ozier

Amadi Ozier is an assistant professor of English at UW-Madison and a scholar specializing in black diasporic literature, with a particular interest in humor and psychoanalysis, performance studies, capitalism, and cultural history. They are currently working on a book manuscript about humor and irony in black bourgeois literature at the turn of the twentieth century. Their research has been generously supported by the Ford Foundation; the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis; the Beinecke Library at Yale University; UW-Madison Office of the Vice Chancellor of Research; Sigma Tau Delta, the international English honors fraternity; and the NYC Narrative Power Network for Health Equity and Racial Justice Project Grant.

Contributions

Lynching Modernism: Ulysses, America, and the Negro Minstrel Abroad

At one point late in Ulysses, while referencing the fictionalized account of a graphic, gruesome American lynching of a black man, a character in "Cyclops” refers to the ill-fated mob victim as a  "Sambo.” Sambo is a plantation-era racial term that, by the early twentieth century, had become an enduring American stage archetype, often performed in blackface, that spun entertainment from stereotypes about black Americans as provincial and lazy. By naming his lynching victim "Sambo,” Joyce marks the lynching as a theatrical phenomenon, spectacularly American.