Black comedy and the Bildungsroman: Fran Ross's Oreo.

In this essay, I place Fran Ross's dazzling, unjustly neglected novel, Oreo, at the centre of contemporary discussions of race, gender, and the politics of laughter in the racist, misogynistic, and homophobic regime that includes but that is not limited to the post-Obama United States. This apparently anachronistic move elaborates on the insight of the few critics who have attended to Ross's novel and who, accounting for its failure to win an audience in the 1970s, have described it as 'ahead of its time'. In its very untimeliness, I argue, Ross's novel has surprising lessons for those of us who would look to both comedy and the novel, especially the Bildungsroman, for advice on how to live in hard times. Demonstrating how this comic Bildungsroman from the 1970s speaks to us today, I also address its implications for our understanding of the past and future of the Bildungsroman as genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]