Two Black Men Walk Home Alone at Night: Transatlantic Tales of Urban Vulnerability and Beatboxing

corine labridy

For the past few years, I’ve been conceptualizing a theory of laughter that adequately, carefully, caringly, ethically, broadly yet specifically attends to the particularities of French black¹ laughter in stand-up comedy. When I say “I’ve been conceptualizing”, it would be more honest to say that I’ve been thinking/dreaming of conceptualizing a theory that would attend to French black laughter, but that I have been failing to develop anything that comes close enough to doing so adequately, carefully, caringly, ethically, broadly yet specifically — and I refuse to sacrifice any of those adverbs.

Alas, I made the fatal mistake of stating laughter as an interest in my professional academic biography, and I routinely get contacted about my nonexistent, groundbreaking work on comedy. Sure, I have written a couple of academic articles about humor in black and French-Caribbean literary and philosophical contexts, and I regularly teach two courses titled “Humor and Tricky Topics” and “Le rire et l’autre”, but as things stand, I run the risk of living on as that person of whom people ask, “Whatever happened to that scholar who was working on French black laughter? Did she ever publish anything…?” Let me explain the holdup. First, my other research concerns dystopias, and hopefully, I don’t need to say more about why that is currently cooking on high on the front burner. Second, as a French black scholar based in the United States and working on French black topics, I grapple with paralyzing sets of questions that emerge partly from my insider/outsider condition — my blessing and my curse — and partly from the strictures of academia.

Paralyzing conundrum #1: The tricky question of blackness (and reception).
French does not have a word for blackness. I’ll discuss this in a future essay, but for now, consider what it means, culturally and socio-politically, when a concept is deemed not relevant enough for a word to organically emerge for it. In France, a universalist republic that does not account for race in its census and whose Assemblée Nationale recently voted to strike the word from its constitution, it’s acceptable, even a sign of enlightenment, to say that you don’t see color. No color, no race — and in theory, no race, no racism. And while this idea comes from the noblest of places, in practice, it has made it polarizing to examine the concrete experiences of people of color in France, even though they are irrefutably dissimilar from those of an imagined, homogenized, “neutrally” white population. In a self-professed raceless social landscape, the absence of a substantive for blackness seems non-urgent, and black studies superfluous.

But while such studies are anathema in France, they have found breath in the United States, where French, Francophone, and American scholars have had the latitude to explore black lives in hexagonal France, its overseas territories, and former colonies. As word of this research conducted across the Atlantic permeates the French public sphere, intellectuals and pundits worry over what they perceive as a deluge of inadequate American conceptual tools for parsing a problem they maintain isn’t one. Thus far, instead of responding with a more localized critical apparatus, the consensus has been to resist developing this new discipline in France.

But there is a space where these topics have roamed free for two decades now: the stand-up stage.² I agree with Joanne Gilbert when she writes that “humor is an epistemological lens […] that affords a critical perspective otherwise unavailable to mainstream audiences”,³ and although stand-up is not entirely shielded from outside pressures (after all, in this capitalist world, comics must eat, so tickets must sell), it remains a relatively unfiltered space from which to study race politics in France. Still, as a French scholar affiliated with an American institution, I wonder: would my research on blackness and humor fall on stubbornly colorblind, possibly suspicious, ears in France? On a different note, in my search for a black laughter à la française, do I risk reproducing essentializing models that reduce this laughter to a monolith? Or worse, would I unwittingly blacken this particular blackness, a trap author Paul Beatty warned us all about?⁴ How can I celebrate the very aliveness of French black laughters when, quite often, theorizing amounts to a deadening crystallization?

Paralyzing conundrum #2: The sticky issue of form.
Jokes die a little the moment you start explaining them. Writing about them is a deeper injury yet. Still, many books have been published about humor. The best ones, in my opinion, are those that manage to not totally alienate form from content, that is, that can write humorously about humor (it’s much harder to do than it seems but see Beatty’s Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor for a best practice). With this in mind, the best books about laughter might not be books at all.⁵ Long or short-form documentaries might be the most adequate medium… but not necessarily. In 2018, a French documentary titled (in the cringiest possible way) Voulez-vous rire avec moi ce soir? set out to “explore how stand-up comics make audiences laugh across cultures.” Amid an overwhelmingly masculinist roster, only four women appear — although one of them is the brilliant polyglot comic Suzy Eddie Izzard, who easily counts for five of her peers, since she has not only performed presenting as many genders, but she has also been known to make audiences laugh in English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish. More puzzling yet, not a single black comic, Francophone or otherwise, is featured, even though many cite Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle as inspirations.⁶ While a response to that documentary is still to come, I wonder how best to present research on a rising generation of French comics who have not so much moved beyond race as complexified it by attending to their multiple intersectionalities onstage — I think, for instance, of the versatile Martinican Noam Sinseau, who mixes poetry, ballroom culture, and advocacy for bald men to his stand-up, or the Guadeloupean Tahnée l’autre, a self-proclaimed métisse, lesbian, and part-time feminist. Theirs is an embodied resistance, which, I’ll argue someday, doesn’t simply challenge France’s colorblind impulse but actively undermines the reifying principles that produce identities in the République universelle. Can or should their exuberant poetics be contained between the covers of an academic monograph?

Setting aside questions of reception and form for now, I am interested in how black comics care for themselves, each other, and their multiple communities through laughter. How do they be/hold their black and Afro-descendant peers, bearing witness to what it means to exist precariously nestled in the blind spot of the greater French community that is the République? How do they invite the (mostly white) mainstream to recognize universalism as a construct that can only bear juiceless fruit as long as it fails to understand whiteness’s non-neutrality? For my colleague Jennifer Boum Make, “Caring, or the concept of care in a broad sense, encompasses values such as attentiveness, responsibility, nurturance, and responsiveness.”⁷ I see black comics as often (but not always) relating to their publics that way. My hope is that this care work exceeds the borders of the comedy club stage and seeps, or better yet, spills into the streets, but I don’t necessarily believe comics should be overtly didactic about it; in fact, it might be better if the change happens subliminally, almost unbeknownst to the public itself. Undoubtedly, some stand-up aims to maintain the status quo,⁸ but I am most interested in the kind of stand-up that, “under the guise of a pleasant differentiation rather acceptable for the community”, is in fact “a fundamental rejection, matter in a state of bubbling.”⁹ In other words, I am most fascinated by trickster work. Altogether, I believe that insofar as joking is always a mutinous use of language (to joke is always to play fast and loose with a system), laughing and making others laugh is always already rebellious work. But I’m looking for what might make it revolutionary.

Returning to the topic of blackness, I ground my thinking in a global, thus necessarily comparative diasporic cultural history, meaning that I take seriously the idea that French blackness, though evidently idiosyncratic, does not exist in a vacuum but is constantly informed and nourished by other expressions of blackness worldwide. Nadine George-Graves offers a felicitous illustration for this idea with her concept of diasporic spidering, which she defines as “the multidirectional process by which people of African descent define their lives. The lifelong ontological gathering of information by going out into the world and coming back to the self.”¹⁰ While continuing to brush away notions of essential blackness, we can easily observe common tropes and trends across the diaspora’s cultures, whether organically homespun from comparable experiences of anti-black oppression or exported, adopted, and adapted across the Atlantic, having traveled via the wild worldwide web. When French black comics perform, they contribute to and expand this shared diasporic cultural repertoire by circulating these tropes and trends in new spaces, and while they’re at it, they educate their public(s), willing or not, in this diasporic literacy.¹¹ If these shared tropes and trends testify to the ineffable connectedness of the global African diaspora, it is in their variations that we can learn something about the particular context in which they are deployed and received. In what follows, I’ll close-read two stand-up bits by black comics on either side of the Atlantic who riff on the same set of diasporic tropes — the strange vulnerability of black men walking alone late at night ... and beatboxing — to see what they can tell us about how the respective zeitgeists of the United States and France shape black laughters.

We’ll start with New Yorker Greer Barnes, who is perhaps best described as a comics’ comic. Beloved by his peers, as evidenced by his multiple writing credits for major American shows, chances are he is the funniest man you’ve never heard of … unless you are one of the 2.5 M viewers who watched his 2024 eleven-minute routine on Don’t Tell Comedy’s YouTube channel, from which the bit I will discuss is excerpted. Before I say anything else, I’ll admit that said bit lives rent-free in my head and has become a precious household joke in my multiracial, multicultural family. At any given moment, one of us might mutter any minute part of it, and someone is guaranteed to complete it. And each time, we’re surprised to find that our endless reiterations have yet to dim its aura.

Barnes takes the stage in a neat, versatile street look: a buttoned-up army-green shirt-jacket, well-fitted blue denim jeans, a skull cap beanie, and a pair of iconic Timberland boots. He lands at about 10% attractive construction worker, 60% cool suburban uncle, and 40% hip-hop studio producer, and whether the math adds up or not, he looks 100% masculine up on that stage. This picture of virility is fast dispelled with his first utterance: a timid “yay!” followed by a string of awkward mumbling. “Wow, how do I start?” he muses, unsure. “I was in the park last night {the crowd is already laughing, as everyone knows a park at night is no place for a black man} chasing this white guy {louder laughter}. That’s a Black History Month joke,” he adds, shrugging and shaking his head, “spilled over into March.” And with these first few sentences that self-consciously call attention to the craft of joking itself, Barnes begins his subtle yet methodical deconstruction of racial and gender assumptions. From here on out, few things are as they seem in his artful play with audience expectations: strong black men can be quite vulnerable, but fortunately, black squirrels have their backs; stoners worry about the natural world; and Africanized killer bees dream aloud of becoming honey bees. At every turn, Barnes undoes stereotyped images of black masculinities, but also declines to offer stable new ones in exchange. This refusal is integral to what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call “fugitive planning” in their groundbreaking opus the undercommons. What is being refused here? In the book’s preface, Jack Halberstam explains, and I hope you will indulge me in quoting their beautiful definition at length:

If you want to know what the undercommons wants, what Moten and Harney want, what black people, indigenous peoples, queers and poor people want, what we (the “we” who cohabit in the space of the undercommons) want, it is this – we cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part; so we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls. We cannot say what new structures will replace the ones we live with yet, because once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming.¹²

Barnes’s comedy is oriented toward that great outside, toward what lies beyond the walls, and as it sketches its convergence line, it refuses to do so in pen, precisely to let the wanting, the being, and the becoming remain (on the) loose. Poetically, what I term Barnes’s fugitive laughter practice expresses itself in punchlines that leave no welts but whose meaning spirals out in sinusoidal waves instead. What does that have to do with beatboxing, you ask? I’m coming around to it.

Three minutes and six seconds into his routine, having already covered quite a bit of ground, Barnes cups his ear and says,

What’s that? {no one asked anything.} What don’t I like? {still no one} I’ll tell you: I don’t like walking up behind white women at night. {laughter} Makes me really uncomfortable. {laughter} So I cross the street. {louder laughter}

Barnes reverses the economy of danger in this age-old scenario. In this universe, white women are the real menaces, and black men feel unsafe, alone at night in their presence. Upon further thinking, this fantasy is not so different from the real world, where a certain segment of white women has been known to call the police on black men minding their own business. Here, the specter of sexual assault pulls down its mask and reveals itself to have been anti-black policing all along. As this realization slowly washes over the audience, I surmise their laughter salutes Barnes’s sleight of hand rather than mocks his very real vulnerability in public spaces. It is the equivalent of “wows” at the magician’s prestige. Barnes continues,

Couple nights ago, I’m walking home. I got my Beats going {he points to his ears}. I don’t got no headphones, I just got beats. {Barnes performs choppy motions, softly singing to himself like a tween in front of his bedroom mirror. This lasts a little too long. The crowd loves every second of it.} And I’m walkin’. {Barnes now breaks into the smoothest, dopest beatboxing. The crowd loses it.}

Puns and other double-entendres are, of course, comics’ bread and butter, but pointedly for Barnes, the journey is often from the concrete to the soft, from the tangible world to what lies outside the walls. BeatsTM headphones are dematerialized and morphed into human beats that float off into the nighttime air. But Barnes must interrupt himself:

Uho! White woman. I think I’ll cross the street. {Beatboxing resumes briefly.} Uho! Another white woman… So now I am walking in the middle of the street, which makes it look even more creepy.

As Barnes stands in the middle of the road, a cab driver honks:

‘Get out of the street, brother!’ {Barnes says in an Indian accent. The crowd gasps at the stereotype but still laughs.} I’m like, ‘Vishnu, there are white women all over the place.’ ‘Holy shit, get in!’ {still in an Indian accent.} He drives me to safety. ‘Brother, when walking at night, you have to be very careful. These policemen and white women are very dangerous. You have to take care of yourself, Denzel.’ {The crowd howls.}

As this utopian picture of subaltern solidarity miraculously unfolds, the crowd isn’t quite sure they can laugh at the accent, but they can at least laugh at the irony of a habitually stereotyped figure doing some stereotyping of his own. The one who’s historically been tricked out of defining his own image is now the trickster. If, in this marvelous world where black squirrels give advice to their human counterparts, the audience can temporarily accept that the cab driver might just magically be aptly named after the Hindu protector of the universe, they know Barnes’s name is not Denzel. Barnes corrects him:

Yeah, that’s not my name. ‘Mahahaha… As my name is not Vishnu. {The crowd laughs and claps.} Touché nigga!’ {louder laughter, louder claps}

In a final upset, not-Vishnu tricks the trickster who used to be tricked, raises Barnes’s Vishnu with a Denzel, then proceeds to throw all codes out the window once and for all with his French-meets-the-hood coda. Can not-Vishnu say that? Maybe, because somewhere in Moten and Harney’s undercommons, Barnes and the cab driver found each other, did some fugitive planning, reached a place seemingly outside the walls and beyond danger, and that’s just how you begin tearing shit down. It’s messy, and it’s beautiful.

I could talk forever about those 120 seconds of pure joy, but I’ll move on to our French comic, Fary. Born in France of immigrant Cabo Verdean parents, Fary reached the mountain top of the French cultural landscape thanks to a series of savvy career moves: a Netflix special in 2018, Fary is the New Black,¹³ followed by a second one in 2020, a two-parter titled Hexagone, from which the bit I will discuss is excerpted; the launch of his own comedy club in the heart of Paris that same year; and a main role in Jean-Pascal Zadi’s cult mockumentary, Tout simplement noir, also in 2020. His popularity earned him the unique honor of playing the hallowed tennis venue Roland Garros; a worldwide tour with several dates in the US; and even a New York Times article calling him a “leading figure in [France]’s stand-up scene, known for confronting issues of discrimination and identity.”¹⁴ Fary certainly embraced his role of gadfly in the ear of the colorblind République universelle when, at an award ceremony, he greeted the crowd with “Salut les Blancs!” (Hello white people!). But although that same New York Times article declared that Fary was “evolv[ing] faster than France” on questions of race, I’d counter that he is meeting France right where it is. Fary is very much the product of his epistemè, and should by no means be blamed for it. In the bit I’ll discuss, what he has to say about walking home alone at night as a (black) man and beatboxing indexes a very French way of thinking, haunted by the ghost of French humanism.

For Hexagone, Fary trades the cramped, sweaty, boozy intimacy of the comedy club for a visibly sold-out classic French theater — a gilded belle époque situation. In one of his signature custom-made deconstructed suits, he looks respectable as hell onstage, as he bows and curtsies to the crowd. While his baroque style sets him apart from other comics who tend to make more homely sartorial choices, there is something rather stable about his monochromatic block look, which declines a couple of shades on the spectrum from beige to brown, and his neatly parted and braided dreadlocks, black on one side, and bleached blonde on the other. Instead of being dialectically harmonized into a new ontology whose parts refuse definition, he stands as a legibly dichotomous figure, sharp edges on display. This ostentatious binarity is strategic: in a society little accustomed to seeing racialized people on their own terms, embracing both light and dark is already quite a statement. In the second part of his special, Fary continues his exploration of identity in France, all the while weaving in commentary on religion and gender relationships, before landing on what will become one of the show’s leitmotivs: men (presumably black men, although he never specifies), women (presumably white women, although he never specifies) = same struggle.¹⁵ Fary’s stage persona is abrasive and self-righteous: he interrupts the public’s laughter, telling them they haven’t understood the joke yet; he imitates a Portuguese accent, then shames the audience for laughing; he participates in the international sport of bashing and objectifying the Kardashians; he makes fun of an audience member’s laughter, suggesting they get it checked out; and even though his impression of annoying feminists is ironic, it’s still unpleasant. Ultimately, yes, it’s a black man standing up there on that stage, but above anything else, it’s a French man who’s evidently turned pro at that beloved national pastime: complaining. What does that have to do with beatboxing, you ask? I’m coming around to it.

The bit I am interested in begins 34 minutes into the hour-long special and takes about 13 minutes to reach its final punchline — spoiler: yeah, it’s “beatbox.” Fary laments that even though Paris is the third most visited capital in the world, it’s still unsafe for a woman to walk home alone at night. On the other hand, as he states plainly,

Moi, si je marche seul à 3 h du matin, dans Paris, je suis en soirée. {scattered laughter} C’est ça, s’qui s’passe. […] quand je dis ça, en général, tu sens les regards des gars qui disent, “alors, oui, vous, certainement, si vous marchez seuls dans la rue à 3 h, c’est vous le danger.”{laughter}

(Me, if I’m walking alone at 3 a.m., in Paris, that’s because I’m out partying. That’s what’s up. […] when I say that, in general, I sense that some guys think “so, yeah, you, surely, if you’re walking alone in the street at 3 a.m., you’re the danger.”{laughter})

Even though he maintains racial non-specificity here, like Barnes, he conjures up the well-known scenario of dangerous, hypersexual black men on the prowl in the city, but conversely, he does nothing to fully dispel it, leaving the specter of sexual assault to loom over the rest of the bit. Fary continues,

je me suis rendu compte que le combat de la féministe, c’était presque le — […] je m’identifie beaucoup à la féministe, pas la féministe lambda […] mais la féministe qui casse les couilles, c’est à elle que je m’identifie.

(I realized that the feminist struggle was almost the — I really identify with feminists, not the average feminist […] but the ballbusting kind, that’s who I identify with.).

The bad part about that, he adds, is that at some point, when you’re a vocal advocate, like he is about disenfranchised suburban youth (meaning racialized youth living on the outskirts of large French cities) and feminists are about their grievances, people stop listening to you because you’ve become a caricature of yourself. He leaves it at that, offering no way out of that impasse, and returns to the topic of women’s insecurity in the metropolis, explaining that he really began to sympathize with women after something that happened to him a few years back. One night, as he was walking home alone, a stranger followed him into the vestibule of his Parisian apartment building. After a tense moment of sizing each other up (the man was much taller than Fary), the intruder breaks into an aggressive display of beatboxing — and not even good beatboxing, according to Fary himself, who admits that he doesn’t know anything about it. Still, Fary demonstrates with some caricatural beatboxing. Regaining his composure after the shock of that unsolicited private performance and sensing obscurely that his virility is at stake, Fary mentally psychs himself up and retorts the Frenchest thing there ever was,

Vous habitez ici? {laughter} (Do you live here?) {laughter}

To this truly impressive show of machismo power, the intruder responds with

“Ah, pardon! Désolé … je parle pas français.” {laughter} (“Oh, excuse me! Sorry … I don’t speak French.” (apparently, in perfect French)) {laughter}

and vanishes into the night, presumably to look for his next beatboxing (?) victim. None the wiser, Fary returns to his apartment with a new fear of mouth noises. There is no moment of recognition between the two men. Even though they speak the same language, they just can’t connect. The stranger remains strange, and his racelessness is unsettling. Although beatboxing belongs to everyone, its modern reinvention finds its roots in black American hip-hop culture, which leaves the audience to assume the intruder is black. This does nothing to undermine the stereotype of the scary black man roaming the night, but I’ll give it to Fary that the fact that it is two starkly different black men standing in that dark vestibule, at the very least, challenges the idea of a monolithic black masculinity.

Somehow, though, this confusing moment does lead to an epiphany. In the seconds following this confrontation, which he insists happened in real life, Fary recalls realizing that if he had been a woman, in that vestibule alone, the story might have had a different ending:

Ça doit être ça en fait, d’être une femme, hein? C’est là que ça m’a percuté. {the crowd listens, quiet.} (That’s what it must feel like, to be a woman, right? That’s when it hit me.) {the crowd listens, quiet.}

It is only through identification, through a shared feeling of vulnerability, that Fary relates to women and feminists. And it is only through the detour of their more legible experience that he can make his own struggles visible to others — but he does not unpack this for his public. Perhaps he trusts them to get how problematic that is more than I do. After a pregnant pause, Fary pushes the identification further, pondering that perhaps the stranger had mistaken him for a woman. {the crowd laughs}

Si ça se trouve, il m’a vu de dos, OK. Il m’a suivi, on est rentrés dans le hall, je me suis retourné, et il a vu que j’étais pas une femme, et il s’est dit: euuuh … beatbox? {The crowd laughs and applauds.} (Maybe he saw me from behind, right? He followed me, we stepped into the hall, I turned around, and he saw that I wasn’t a woman and he thought to himself: eh … beatbox?). {The crowd laughs and applauds.}

As an epilogue, Fary concludes that he didn’t mind being mistaken for a woman — after all, he assumes his feminine side — but what bothered him was the few seconds of hesitation that preceded the beatboxing display.

Ça veut dire que potentiellement, c’était une agression sexuelle … {the crowd laughs.} et pendant trois-quatre secondes, il a hésité. {laughter} Pendant trois-quatre secondes, il s’est dit: haaa, c’est quoi une barbe? {laughter and applause} (That means that potentially, it was going to be a sexual assault … {the crowd laughs.} and for 3-4 seconds, he hesitated. {laughter} For 3-4 seconds, he thought: bah, what’s a beard anyway?) {laughter and applause}.

I’ll confess I am always baffled at the crowd’s laughter in this very last bit. What’s so funny about the possibility of a (black) man being sexually assaulted? Is it that the one typically thought of as the trickster could have been potentially tricked? The stakes are too high for that to be funny. Perhaps what’s funny is that the option was between sexual assault and beatboxing. I could see that. Or perhaps, the more generous explanation is that the audience is simply relieved nothing happened.

To transition into the next bit, Fary reiterates, once again, that his struggle is no different from that of the feminists:

Tout ce qu’on veut, c’est comme les féministes. Tout ce qu’on veut, c’est genre, euh, d’une, être entendus, bien sûr, mais juste, euh, être au même niveau que les autres. Être respectés comme les autres. {The crowd listens.} (All we want is just like the feminists. All we want, is like, first, to be heard, of course, but then, just to be at the same level as the others. To be respected like the others.) {The crowd listens.}

Fary assumes the audience knows who we is because he assumes they know who he is, but throughout the entirety of the second part of this comedy special, not once does he utter the word noir, rehearsing France’s awkwardness around race and particularly blackness. Who knows who he really embodies for them? Just any Other? As his identitarian set of coordinates remains oddly empty in this particular show, women serve as the only proxy to signify the precariousness of this unnamed we-ness and this unnamed blackness. And as the special winds down, Fary goes on to wish that the French flag were a stronger symbol of national cohesion that everyone, including women and we, could rally under. While there is a laudable bid for intergender solidarity, there is no fugitive planning here — in its place, a craving for what the nation, in all its enlightened humanistic and universalist splendor, has to offer: equality. But ultimately, this request doubles down on the status quo. It simply asks for what’s already on the table to be distributed more fairly. The idea is beautiful, yes, and surely progressive in some ways, but it’s not so messy, and it doesn’t go about tearing shit down.

In fairness, Fary is typically more explicit about race and blackness, and this should in no way come to represent his entire range. In truth, the fact that, in the second and final part of his special, he leans into this universal we seemingly encompassing all racialized minorities, has much more to tell us about France than about him. The fact that in the 21st century, this we still feels the need to constitute itself as such, in its non-differentiated mass, just to be visible, just to simply matter, confirms the grip of France’s enduring colorblindness. This we epitomizes what literary critic Gayatri Spivak famously called strategic essentialism. Any smaller, more homogeneous-looking coalition is quickly accused of communitarianism and alienated in France, as has been the case, for instance, for people of North African descent. It’s a reactive we that seeks to emulate and be recognized by the greater national we, from whose participation it has been gatekept. It is a we that’s still very much entangled with coloniality’s narrow horizon of desire. But as Fary himself points out, things are changing quickly. French black people, for one, have begun to recognize themselves and each other as such,¹⁶ and on the stand-up stage and elsewhere, it’s been producing pure gold.

I only blame Fary a little for not giving me the taxicab ending I was hoping for. It’s unfortunate that even though this special opens with a scathing critique of French universalism, its poetics unwittingly replicate the république’s reified modes of thinking and its blind spots. To Barnes’s fugitive meanings and expansive identities, Fary offers hope for better guarded buildings and solidarities predicated on stable subjectivities. If I could live in one world, it would be Barnes’s posthuman fantasy, with its squirrels and bees, its nurturing stoners and not-Vishnus. It’d be the one where humanism is “re-enchanted”,¹⁷ to use David Scott and Sylvia Wynter’s delightful phrase, by mutual care between humans and non-humans and a joy in rebellious, and even revolutionary word play. It’d be the one where beatboxing is the soundtrack to endlessly reimagined utopias of black aliveness, and not a last-minute alternative to sexual assault. It’d be the one where we could all walk home alone at night and dream about a future beyond the walls.

Notes