Amadi Ozier is a scholar specializing in Black American and Diasporic Literature and Performance.
Ozier has a particular interest in race, humor, lynching culture, capitalism, and black cultural history. They currently work as an Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Research Fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, NY. They reside in Madison, WI, and Brooklyn, NY.
About Amadi Ozier
Book Project
Amadi Ozier’s book project, Humor Among Uppity Negroes: A Black Literary Study, argues that humor in African American writing of the early twentieth century borrows its vocabularies, forms, and thematics from contemporaneous debates among race thinkers about improving black social conditions by performing bourgeois notions of propriety and respectability. Middle class black writers used a practiced sense of humor to joke about topical issues like lynching, interracial sex, and political disorganization, disrupting blackface minstrel narratives about black people as unintelligent, unhygienic, and lazy. In that sense, African American humor literature was informed by the same social processes that cultivated New Negro values of exemplarity, collectivity, and intelligence.
Black affluence is organized not around wealth accrual but through a shared attachment to a repertoire of communal gestures, scripts, and cultural signs that signify upon an evolving relationship to labor, white capital, and racial loyalty. Ultimately, Ozier argues that black humorists used irony to index cultural anxieties about black representation for both intraracial and interracial readerships amid the development of an emerging black American middle class.
Awards and Publications
Ozier’s 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; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library; the UW-Madison Office of the Vice Chancellor of Research; and Sigma Tau Delta, the international English honors fraternity.
Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, Social Text, Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies, Early American Literature, and Oxford Handbook of African American Humor.
Service
Ozier also facilitates public workshops on protest preparedness, tenant organization, and campus activism. Ozier’s community organizing work in housing justice, abolitionist popular education, and mutual aid has been generously supported by grants from the New York City Department of Health and the Morgridge Center for Public Service and has appeared in media outlets such as Democracy Now!, the New York Times, Gothamist, and Wisconsin Public Radio, including projects with the Crown Heights C.A.R.E. Collective (which Ozier co-founded) and the Crown Heights Tenant Union in Brooklyn, NY.
Art Credit:
Laura Wheeler Waring, Girl in Pink Dress, 1927
Aaron Douglas, Portrait of Marian Anderson, 1940
Lois Mailou Jones, Two Women, 1950
Recent Work
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"Lynching Modernism: Ulysses, America, and the Negro Minstrel Abroad" - Modernism/modernity
September 2023. James Joyce’s modern, transnational representations of anti-semitism through American iconography around blackness.
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![How to Stage a Rally: A People's Field Guide]()
"How to Stage a Rally: A People's Field Guide" - Crown Heights CARE Collective x Crown Heights Tenant Union
November 2023. Step by step abolitionist guide for organizing creative, large-scale protests and demonstrations without police intervention.
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Bibliography: "Theater and Performance in the 19th Century" - Oxford Bibliographies
February 2021. This article focuses on primary works and criticism on the origins and evolution of African American theater culture from the late 18th century up to but not including the New Negro (or Harlem) Renaissance (c. 1920).
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Review Essay: "This Body Still Has Time: Jermaine Singleton’s Cultural Melancholy"
August 2017. Amadi Ozier on Jermaine Singleton’s Cultural Melancholy: Readings of Race, Impossible Mourning, and African American Ritual (2015)
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Review Essay: "African American Literature in Transition, 1750–1800"
Amadi Ozier on African American Literature in Transition, 1750–1800 ed. by Rhondda Robinson Thomas (2022)
Contact
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