This talk asks the question: why and how does James Joyce’s Ulysses engage American racial iconography like lynching and blackface minstrelsy? Amadi Ozier argues that Joyce stages American racism as a metaphor for other kinds of racial and national identification, especially through British anti-semitism. One of the ways that the novel makes sense of the characters’ encounters with anti-semitism, anti-Irish sentiment, and xenophobia is by placing lynching and blackface minstrelsy on a spectrum of subjugation and alienation that attaches the violence of anti-semitism to specific kinds of representations of racial violence. Joyce develops his modern aesthetic through a performative engagement with and disengagement from global representations of American racial violence, what Ozier calls “lynching modernism."

Amadi Ozier is a scholar specializing in black diasporic literature, with a particular interest in humor in psychoanalysis, performance studies, black capitalism, and cultural history. They are currently developing a book project on “uppity humor” in black middle-class literature at the turn of the twentieth century. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Social Text, Modernism/modernity, Early American Literature, Oxford Handbook of African American Humor, and Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies.