Laughing at the End of the World

In Laughing at the End of the World, Diego A. Millan explores the profound role laughter plays in making and marking human difference. Millan highlights how the depiction of Black laughter can reinforce or disrupt the foundations of anti-Blackness, especially when portrayed as excessive or rebellious. Engaging works from nineteenth-century slave narratives to Fran Ross’s 1974 satire Oreo, Millan examines anti-Blackness's relationship to laughter as a colonial remnant and analyzes how Black writers and thinkers use the disruption of laughter to work through problems of race and gender. By approaching laughter as a marker of humanity and liberation, he draws attention to laughter itself as an opportunity and site for inquiry. In this deep consideration of the role that laughter has played in the development of a Black radical consciousness, Millan demonstrates how laughter expresses an anticolonial vision that reimagines both relationality and interiority while reveling at the end of this current world order.