No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity

by Angela Rosenthal (Editor), David Bindman (Editor), Adrian W. B. Randolph (Editor)

Overview

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, this collection—which gathers scholars in the fields of race, ethnicity, and humor—seems especially urgent. Inspired by Denmark’s Muhammad cartoons controversy, the contributors inquire into the role that racial and ethnic stereotypes play in visual humor and the thin line that separates broad characterization as a source of humor from its power to shock or exploit. The authors investigate the ways in which humor is used to demean or give identity to racial, national, or ethnic groups and explore how humor works differently in different media, such as cartoons, photographs, film, video, television, and physical performance. This is a timely and necessary study that will appeal to scholars across disciplines.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611688214
Publisher:	Dartmouth College Press
Publication date:	12/01/2015
Series:	Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture Series
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

David Bindman is the Emeritus Durning-Lawrence Professor of the History of Art, University College London, and a fellow of the Hutchins Center, Harvard University. He is the author or editor of many books including Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century, also published by Reaktion Books.

Table of Contents

Preface—Adrian W. B. Randolph • Introduction. No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Practice and Theory—David Bindman • Carnivalesque and Grotesque: What Bakhtin’s Laughter Tells Us about Art and Culture—Kobena Mercer • PART 1. ENCOUNTERING HUMOR: RACIAL, NATIONAL, AND ETHNIC STEREOTYPES • Bartolomeo Passarotti and “Comic” Images of Black Africans in Early Modern Italian Art—Paul H. D. Kaplan • “If You Tickle Us, Do We Not Laugh?”: Stereotypes of Jews in English Graphic Humor of the Georgian Era—Frank Felsenstein • James Gillray, Charles James Fox, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade: Caricature and Displacement in the Debate over Reform—Katherine Hart • The Other Within—Allen Hockley • Material Culture, Slavery, and Governability in Colonial Cuba: The Humorous Lessons of the Cigarette Marquillas—Agnes Lugo-Ortiz • PART 2. RACIAL HUMOR AND THEORIES OF MODERN MEDIA • Fake Nostalgia for the Indian: The Argentinean Fiction of National Identity in the Comics of Patoruzú—Ana Merino • Passing for History: Humor and Early Television Historiography—Mark Williams • Comical Conflations: Racial Identity and the Science of Photography—Tanya Sheehan • PART 3. PERFORMATIVE COMEDY AND RACE • Laughter as Performance: Some Eighteenth-Century Examples—David Bindman • Bittersweet Blackness: Humor and the Assertion of Ethnic Identity in Eleanor Antin’s Eleanora Antinova—Cherise Smith • Traveling Humor Reimagined: The Comedic Unhinging of the Western Gaze in Caribbean Postcards—Sam Vásquez • Springtime for Hitler Every Year: Dani Levy’s Hitler Comedy My Führer (2007)—Veronika Fuechtner • Contributors • Index

Editorial Reviews

“The scholarship in this volume is superior across the board and a much-needed contribution to the field of race and representation in Western art. Approaching the issues of race and stereotype from another angle, that of humor, these essays help us expand our thinking about power, resistance, and ambivalence, complicating already complicated discourse on identity.”
—Adrienne Childs, WE.B. Du Bois Research Institute, Harvard University


“The essays in . . . this outstanding collection focus on selected works of art that characterize racial, ethnic or gender stereotypes within a culture.”—ARLIS/NA


“An important contribution to discourses of power and identity. . . . Highly recommended.”
—Choice


“No Laughing Matter is a complex and sophisticated book that adds a new critical layer to the field of race and representation in art history. Each essay includes numerous images allowing the reader to fully appreciate the range of visual material related to the subject of humor. No Laughing Matter will certainly initiate rich discussions on the myriad ways visual humor invades our social lives and cultural interactions, because humor is at the crux of how we have constructed identities, communities, and nationhood in the past and how we continue to do so in the present.”

—CAA Reviews


“No Laughing Matter is an engrossing collection, containing some fascinating material and some truly engaging contributions.”
—Humor: International Journal of Humor Research

From the Publisher