The Rhetoric of Racist Humour PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download The Rhetoric of Racist Humour PDF full book. Access full book title The Rhetoric of Racist Humour by Simon Weaver. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Simon Weaver
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131701782X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Get Book
Book Description
In today's multicultural and multireligious societies, humour and comedy often become the focus of controversy over alleged racist or offensive content, as shown, for instance, by the intense debate of Sacha Baron Cohen's characters Ali G and Borat, and the Prophet Muhammad cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Despite these intense debates, commentary on humour in the academy lacks a clear way of connecting the serious and the humorous, and a clear way of accounting for the serious impact of comic language. The absence of a developed 'serious' vocabulary with which to judge the humorous tends to encourage polarized debates, which fail to account for the paradoxes of humour. This book draws on the social theory of Zygmunt Baumann to examine the linguistic structure of humour, arguing that, as a form of language similar to metaphor, it is both unstable and unpredictable, and structurally prone to act rhetorically; that is, to be convincing. Deconstructing the dominant form of racism aimed at black people in the US, and that aimed at Asians in the UK, The Rhetoric of Racist Humour shows how racist humour expresses and supports racial stereotypes in the US and UK, while also exploring the forms of resistance presented by the humour of Black and Asian comedians to such stereotypes. An engaging exploration of modern, late modern and fluid or postmodern forms of humour, this book will be of interest to sociologists and scholars of cultural and media studies, as well as those working in the fields of race and ethnicity, humour and cultural theory.
Author: Simon Weaver
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131701782X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Get Book
Book Description
In today's multicultural and multireligious societies, humour and comedy often become the focus of controversy over alleged racist or offensive content, as shown, for instance, by the intense debate of Sacha Baron Cohen's characters Ali G and Borat, and the Prophet Muhammad cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Despite these intense debates, commentary on humour in the academy lacks a clear way of connecting the serious and the humorous, and a clear way of accounting for the serious impact of comic language. The absence of a developed 'serious' vocabulary with which to judge the humorous tends to encourage polarized debates, which fail to account for the paradoxes of humour. This book draws on the social theory of Zygmunt Baumann to examine the linguistic structure of humour, arguing that, as a form of language similar to metaphor, it is both unstable and unpredictable, and structurally prone to act rhetorically; that is, to be convincing. Deconstructing the dominant form of racism aimed at black people in the US, and that aimed at Asians in the UK, The Rhetoric of Racist Humour shows how racist humour expresses and supports racial stereotypes in the US and UK, while also exploring the forms of resistance presented by the humour of Black and Asian comedians to such stereotypes. An engaging exploration of modern, late modern and fluid or postmodern forms of humour, this book will be of interest to sociologists and scholars of cultural and media studies, as well as those working in the fields of race and ethnicity, humour and cultural theory.
Author: Tom Wilber
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801456371
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 351
Get Book
Book Description
For the updated paperback edition of Under the Surface, Tom Wilber has written a new chapter and epilogue covering developments since the book's initial publication. Chief among these are the home rule movement and accompanying social and legal events leading up to an unprecedented ban of fracking in New York state, and the outcome of the federal EPA's investigation of water pollution just across the state border in Dimock, Pennsylvania. The industry, with powerful political allies, effectively challenged the federal government’s attempts to intervene in drilling communities in Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and Texas with water problems. But it met its match in a grassroots movement—known as "fractivism"—that sprouted from seeds sown in upstate New York community halls and grew into one of the state’s most influential environmental movements since Love Canal.Wilber weaves a narrative tracing the consequences of shale gas development in northeast Pennsylvania and central New York through the perspective of various stakeholders. Wilber's evenhanded treatment explains how the revolutionary process of fracking has changed both access to our domestic energy reserves and the lives of people living over them.He gives a voice to all constituencies, including farmers and landowners tempted by the prospects of wealth but wary of the consequences; policymakers struggling with divisive issues concerning free enterprise, ecology, and public health; and activists coordinating campaigns based on their respective visions of economic salvation and environmental ruin. Throughout the book, Wilber illustrates otherwise dense policy and legal issues in human terms and shows how ordinary people can affect extraordinary events.
Author: Raúl Pérez
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781503632332
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232
Get Book
Book Description
A rigorous study of the social meaning and consequences of racist humor, and a damning argument for when the joke is not just a joke. Having a good sense of humor generally means being able to take a joke without getting offended--laughing even at a taboo thought or at another's expense. The insinuation is that laughter eases social tension and creates solidarity in an overly politicized social world. But do the stakes change when the jokes are racist? In The Souls of White Jokes Raúl Pérez argues that we must genuinely confront this unsettling question in order to fully understand the persistence of anti-black racism and white supremacy in American society today. W.E.B. Du Bois's prescient essay The Souls of White Folk was one of the first to theorize whiteness as a social and political construct based on a feeling of superiority over racialized others--a kind of racial contempt. Pérez extends this theory to the study of humor, connecting theories of racial formation to parallel ideas about humor stemming from laughter at another's misfortune. Critically synthesizing scholarship on race, humor, and emotions, he uncovers a key function of humor as a tool for producing racial alienation, dehumanization, exclusion, and even violence. Pérez tracks this use of humor from blackface minstrelsy to contemporary contexts, including police culture, politics, and far-right extremists. Rather than being harmless fun, this humor plays a central role in reinforcing and mobilizing racist ideology and power under the guise of amusement. The Souls of White Jokes exposes this malicious side of humor, while also revealing a new facet of racism today. Though it can be comforting to imagine racism as coming from racial hatred and anger, the terrifying reality is that it is tied up in seemingly benign, even joyful, everyday interactions as well-- and for racism to be eradicated we must face this truth.
Author: Simon Weaver
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000452522
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196
Get Book
Book Description
Since 2016 there has been an outpouring of humour, comedy and satire on the United Kingdom’s EU Referendum and decision to leave the EU, or Brexit. This book examines the relationship between Brexit and its comedy, exploring how Brexit and comedy are connected in both Leave and Remain discourse. It argues that both populism and comedy are rhetorical in nature and so are linked through their semantic structure and communicative potential. Considering the incongruities that Brexit presents for British society, the author analyses the populism that has emerged from those incongruities in the form of ironic, ambiguous and dichotomous discourse. Through the analysis of a range of comedy on the EU Referendum and Brexit, including material from stand-up and situation comedy, and political satire of various types, The Rhetoric of Brexit Humour examines the way in which comedy acts as a rhetoric that draws on, supports and attacks the discourses of Brexit. This provides not just an advance in our understanding of political satire but also a clearer description of the nature of populism. This book will appeal to sociologists, political scientists, media and communications scholars, and anyone interested in Brexit, populism and comedy.
Author: Ayanna Thompson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108623298
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 518
Get Book
Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race shows teachers and students how and why Shakespeare and race are inseparable. Moving well beyond Othello, the collection invites the reader to understand racialized discourses, rhetoric, and performances in all of Shakespeare's plays, including the comedies and histories. Race is presented through an intersectional approach with chapters that focus on the concepts of sexuality, lineage, nationality, and globalization. The collection helps students to grapple with the unique role performance plays in constructions of race by Shakespeare (and in Shakespearean performances), considering both historical and contemporary actors and directors. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race will be the first book that truly frames Shakespeare studies and early modern race studies for a non-specialist, student audience.
Author: Rebecca Krefting
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421414295
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360
Get Book
Book Description
A professor of American Studies—and stand-up comic—examines sharply focused comedy and its cultural utility in contemporary society. Outstanding Academic Title, Choice In this examination of stand-up comedy, Rebecca Krefting establishes a new genre of comedic production, “charged humor,” and charts its pathways from production to consumption. Some jokes are tears in the fabric of our beliefs—they challenge myths about how fair and democratic our society is and the behaviors and practices we enact to maintain those fictions. Jokes loaded with vitriol and delivered with verve, charged humor compels audiences to action, artfully summoning political critique. Since the institutionalization of stand-up comedy as a distinct cultural form, stand-up comics have leveraged charged humor to reveal social, political, and economic stratifications. All Joking Aside offers a history of charged comedy from the mid-twentieth century to the early aughts, highlighting dozens of talented comics from Dick Gregory and Robin Tyler to Micia Mosely and Hari Kondabolu. The popularity of charged humor has waxed and waned over the past sixty years. Indeed, the history of charged humor is a tale of intrigue and subversion featuring dive bars, public remonstrations, fickle audiences, movie stars turned politicians, commercial airlines, emergent technologies, neoliberal mind-sets, and a cavalcade of comic misfits with an ax to grind. Along the way, Krefting explores the fault lines in the modern economy of humor, why men are perceived to be funnier than women, the perplexing popularity of modern-day minstrelsy, and the way identities are packaged and sold in the marketplace. Appealing to anyone interested in the politics of humor and generating implications for the study of any form of popular entertainment, this history reflects on why we make the choices we do and the collective power of our consumptive practices. Readers will be delighted by the broad array of comic talent spotlighted in this book, and for those interested in comedy with substance, it will offer an alternative punchline.
Author: Matthew R. Meier
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317328930
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 434
Get Book
Book Description
In recent decades, some of the most celebrated and culturally influential American oratorical performances have come not from political leaders or religious visionaries, but from stand-up comics. Even though comedy and satire have been addressed by rhetorical scholarship in recent decades, little attention has been paid to stand-up. This collection is an attempt to further cultivate the growing conversation about stand-up comedy from the perspective of the rhetorical tradition. It brings together literatures from rhetorical, cultural, and humor studies to provide a unique exploration of stand-up comedy that both argues on behalf of the form’s capacity for social change and attempts to draw attention to a series of otherwise unrecognized rhetors who have made significant contributions to public culture through comedy.
Author: Terrence T. Tucker
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813065607
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 405
Get Book
Book Description
"An important and timely expansion of American racial discourse. Tucker’s demonstration of how the comic is not (just) funny and how rage is not (just) destructive is a welcome reminder that willful injustice merits irreverent scorn. "—Derek C. Maus, coeditor of Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights "Adroitly explores how comic rage is a skillfully crafted, multifaceted critique of white supremacy and a soaring articulation of African American humanity and possibility. Sparkling and highly readable scholarship."—Keith Gilyard, author of John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism A combustible mix of fury and radicalism, pathos and pain, wit and love—Terrence Tucker calls it "comic rage," and he shows how it has been used by African American artists to aggressively critique America’s racial divide. In Furiously Funny, Tucker finds that comic rage developed from black oral tradition and first shows up in literature by George Schuyler and Ralph Ellison shortly after World War II. He examines its role in novels and plays, following the growth of the expression into comics and stand-up comedy and film, where Richard Pryor, Spike Lee, Whoopi Goldberg, and Chris Rock have all used the technique. Their work, Tucker argues, shares a comic vision that centralizes the African American experience and realigns racial discourse through an unequivocal frustration at white perceptions of blackness. They perpetuate images of black culture that run the risk of confirming stereotypes as a means to ridicule whites for allowing those destructive depictions to reinforce racist hierarchies. At the center of comic rage, then, is a full-throated embrace of African American folk life and cultural traditions that have emerged in defiance of white hegemony’s attempts to devalue, exploit, or distort those traditions. The simultaneous expression of comedy and militancy enables artists to reject the mainstream perspective by confronting white audiences with America’s legacy of racial oppression. Tucker shows how this important art form continues to expand in new ways in the twenty-first century and how it acts as a form of resistance where audiences can engage in subjects that are otherwise taboo.
Author: Cameron C. Nickels
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604737484
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 181
Get Book
Book Description
In Civil War Humor, author Cameron C. Nickels examines the various forms of comedic popular artifacts produced in America from 1861 to 1865, and looks at how wartime humor was created, disseminated, and received by both sides of the conflict. Song lyrics, newspaper columns, sheet music covers, illustrations, political cartoons, fiction, light verse, paper dolls, printed envelopes, and penny dreadfuls--from and for the Union and the Confederacy--are analyzed at length. Nickels argues that the war coincided with the rise of inexpensive mass printing in the United States and thus subsequently with the rise of the country's widely distributed popular culture. As such, the war was as much a "paper war"--involving the use of publications to disseminate propaganda and ideas about the Union and the Confederacy's positions--as one taking place on battlefields. Humor was a key element on both sides in deflating pretensions and establishing political stances (and ways of critiquing them). Civil War Humor explores how the combatants portrayed Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, life on the home front, battles, and African Americans. Civil War Humor reproduces over sixty illustrations and texts created during the war and provides close readings of these materials. At the same time, it places this corpus of comedy in the context of wartime history, economies, and tactics. This comprehensive overview examines humor's role in shaping and reflecting the cultural imagination of the nation during its most tumultuous period.
Author: S. Lockyer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230236774
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 221
Get Book
Book Description
Humour is pervasive in contemporary culture, and is generally celebrated as a public good. Yet there are times when it is felt to produce intolerance, misunderstanding or even hatred. This book brings together, for the first time, contributions that consider the ethics as well as the aesthetics of humour. The book focuses on the abuses and limits of humour, some of which excite considerable social tension and controversy. Beyond a Joke is an exciting intervention, full of challenging questions and issues.
