Derek C. Maus

Derek C. Maus is Professor of English and Communication at the State University of New York at Potsdam, where he teaches numerous courses on a wide variety of subjects in contemporary literature. He is the author of Jesting in Earnest: Percival Everett and Menippean Satire (South Carolina, 2019), Understanding Colson Whitehead (South Carolina, 2014), and Unvarnishing Reality: Subversive Russian and American Cold War Satire (South Carolina, 2011) He has also edited several scholarly collections, including Conversations with Colson Whitehead (Mississippi, 2019), Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights (Mississippi, 2014; co-edited with James J. Donahue) and Finding a Way Home: A Critical Assessment of Walter Mosley’s Fiction (Mississippi, 2008; co-edited with Owen E. Brady). 

While at Concordia, he worked on a project that aimed to develop and to articulate a clearer understanding of the ways in which African American and African Canadian identities are represented in contemporary fiction, emphasizing not only the instances of overlap between the two, but also analyzing the areas in which the existing models of diasporic solidarity (e.g., Molefi Asante’s concept of Afrocentricity, Paul Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic, post-black/post-racial/post-soul aesthetics, or various articulations of Black nationalism/communalism associated with Critical Race Theory) are insufficient in explaining the significant divergences between these two literary-cultural traditions.