Research
Research
Amadi Ozier publishes academic writing on Black humor, performance, and modernist aesthetics, with a focus on race, class, and politics.
Ozier also publishes strategic guides on community organizing rooted in protest and community-led workshops.
Academic Publications
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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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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). This book shows how, even in the earliest days of the U.S., Black writers used print to define freedom on their own terms and build radical communities in the new nation.
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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)
Community Publications
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"Neighbor Crisis Response: A Crown Heights Story." - Crown Heights Tenant Union x Crown Heights CARE Collective (2025)
March 2025. Narrative of a large-scale, high-profile defense Amadi Ozier organized for an elderly tenant facing extensive landlord harassment. Includes a step by step abolitionist guide on building a rapid response network.
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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 (2025, 2023)
November 2023. Step by step abolitionist guide for organizing creative, large-scale protests and demonstrations without police intervention.
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![Zine cover: You Can Start a Rapid Response Network - Crown Heights Tenant Union]()
"You Can Start a Rapid Response Network" - Crown Heights Tenant Union x Cop Watch on Your Block (2025)
2025. This zine is a hands-on guide to building rapid response networks where you live, work, learn, or organize to respond to crises such as evictions, police violence, and workplace retaliation. Covers organizing strategies, communication tools, and role-based coordination for collective safety and mutual aid.
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Madison Tenant Power Handbook (2025)
2025. This zine is a primer for tenants organizing their buildings or neighborhoods in Madison, WI. It outlines core principles, practical strategies for addressing issues like repairs and landlord abuse, and tips for starting conversations with your neighbors.
Bibliography
Books, chapters, and articles.
Ozier, Amadi. Book. Humor Among Uppity Negroes at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A Literary Study. (In progress.)
Humor Among Uppity Negroes argues that early 20th-century Black writers used humor shaped by middle-class values to respond to serious issues like lynching, interracial sex, and political disorganization. Their comedy played with ideas of respectability and intelligence to counter racist stereotypes and challenge blackface imagery. The book shows how Black humor was deeply connected to the rise of a Black middle class and its cultural priorities.
Ozier, Amadi. Book chapter. “Ernest Hogan and the Ironic Bourgeois Fantasy of Black-on-Black Face.” Oxford Handbook of African American Humor Studies. Under contract. Edited by Danielle Fuentes Morgan and Brittney Edmonds.
This paper looks at Ernest Hogan, a popular Black entertainer in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and how he used blackface minstrelsy—a racist form of entertainment—to carve out space for Black creativity and ambition. Focusing on his hit song “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” it explores how Hogan and other Black performers used humor and stereotypes to both survive in a white-dominated industry and speak to Black audiences about class, identity, respectability, and middle-class success. His performances helped shape early Black comedy and showed how satire could both challenge and play into the racial and class politics of the time.
Ozier, Amadi. “Lynching Modernism: Ulysses, America, and the Negro Minstrel Abroad.” Modernism/modernity. March 2024. Peer-reviewed. Also featured publication on the journal’s website.
This project examines how James Joyce engages with American racial iconography—particularly blackface minstrelsy and lynching—to construct a modernist aesthetic and articulate a vision of Irish national identity within a transnational framework. It argues that Joyce’s representations of Blackness and Jewishness reveal the entangled structures of racial and ethnic violence that underpin modernist culture. The concept of “lynching modernism” names Joyce’s ambivalent appropriation of American racial spectacle as both critique and source of symbolic capital.
Libraries.
Crown Heights C.A.R.E. Collective Virtual Zine Library. Project initiated July 2022.
Hundreds of zines on themes related to police abolition and abolitionist community-building, including mutual aid, arrest defense, eviction defense, and militant action, including several original zines like “How to Stage a Rally.”
Tenant Power Virtual Zine Library. Project initiated December 2024.
Hundreds of zines on themes related to tenant organizing including information on strategies and tactics, occupations and blockades, rallies and protests, and the building blocks of organizing your people.
Crown Heights Tenant Union Resource Page. Project initiated February 2025.
Includes information on rent strikes, building + block organizing, action planning, crisis response, eviction blockades, and NYC-specific info on rent stabilized housing.
Madison Tenant Power Resource Page. Project initiated December 2024.
Includes information on researching or reporting your landlord, organizing your building, planning escalatory actions, strategies, and tactics.
Book reviews.
Ozier, Amadi. “African American Literature in Transition, 1750-1800, edited by Rhondda Robinson Thomas.” Early American Literature, Volume 59, Number 3, 2024, pp. 688-696. 10.1353/eal.2024.a940230 https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/12/article/940230/pdf
This book argues that from 1750 to 1800, Black writers were actively shaping ideas about what freedom, citizenship, abolition, and community meant for Black people within the new American republic. By analyzing their use of print and literary forms, I show how these writers built networks of support and resistance, challenging dominant ideas about race and respectability. These early Black literary works reveal how Black people created their own spaces of belonging and political power, laying the groundwork for ongoing struggles over identity and justice.
Ozier, Amadi. “This Body Still Has Time: Jermaine Singleton’s Cultural Melancholy: Readings of Race, Impossible Mourning, and African American Ritual.” Social Text, 2017. https://socialtextjournal.org/this-body-still-has-time-jermaine-singletons-cultural-melancholy-readings-of-race-impossible-mourning-and-african-american-ritual/
Jermaine Singleton’s Cultural Melancholy explores how African American ritual and performance carry “impossible mourning”—a hidden, collective grief rooted in historical racial trauma that shapes Black subjectivity across time. Singleton shows how this submerged affect is transmitted through cultural practices like theater and music, creating ongoing dialogues between past and present racial grief. By making this grief visible, especially in contemporary Black performance, Singleton suggests new ways to confront and transform the legacy of racial trauma.
