Journal ArticleDOI
Secret integrations: black humor and the critique of whiteness
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TLDR
The category of black humor has a racial resonance when applied to American fiction of the 1960s as mentioned in this paper, where desperate individuals negotiate their sense of self in ambivalent exchanges with an imaginary other.Abstract:
The category of black humor has a
racial resonance when applied to American fiction of the 1960s. A recurrent
object of critical interest in this body of comic writing was the function of
"blackness" in the formation of "white" identities. In
Bruce Jay Friedman's "Black Angels" and Terry Southern's
"Twirlin' At Ole Miss" desperate individuals are shown negotiating
their sense of self in ambivalent exchanges with an imaginary other. Thomas
Pynchon, in "The Secret Integration," analyzes an adolescent act of
imitation across racial lines as an effort to overcome socially prescribed
differences. And in "Lost in the Funhouse," John Barth locates
racialized fantasy as a constitutive element of sexual maturation.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture.
Michael Bérubé,Andrew Ross +1 more
TL;DR: Andrew Ross as discussed by the authors argues that the making of "taste" is hardly an aesthetic activity, but rather an exercise in cultural power, policing and carefully redefining social relations between classes.
Journal ArticleDOI
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
Trudier Harris,Toni Morrison +1 more
TL;DR: Morrison as mentioned in this paper argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic, and argues that individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence.
Postmodern materialism: things, people, and the remaking of the social in contemporary American narrative
TL;DR: This paper reinterpreted the critical orthodoxies of postmodern American literature by attending to the everyday objects that populate the worlds of narrative texts written from the 1960s to the first decade of the new millennium, and concluded that postmodern fiction is especially wellsuited for a critical remaking of the social because it is attuned to the ways in which the social is constantly being fashioned by the world of material objects.
DissertationDOI
The serious work of humor in postcolonial literature
TL;DR: The authors argue that humor helps those who deploy it to resist victimhood and enact a psychological rebellion against the circumstances of colonialism and its legacies, and facilitates a sense of community through laughter among both those who deployed it and those who enjoy it as audience members.
Journal ArticleDOI
The persistence of irony: interfering with surrealist black humour
TL;DR: Is not perhaps all ecstasy in one world humiliating sobriety in that complementary to it? as mentioned in this paper argues that "chance is the master of humour" and Max Ernst once wrote.
References
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Book
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
TL;DR: Morrison as discussed by the authors argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic, and argues that individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence.
Book
Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance
TL;DR: Betterton's Funeral"Sticks and Rags": The Celebrity as EffigyVortices of BehaviorThe Life of Betterton: Talking with the DadCanonical Memory and Theatrical NationhoodThe Pinacotheca Bettertonaeana as mentioned in this paper
Book
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
TL;DR: The 20th-anniversary edition of "The Blackening of America: Popular Culture and National Cultures" by Greil Marcus as mentioned in this paper was the first publication of the book.
BookDOI
Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism
TL;DR: The Displacing Whiteness project as mentioned in this paper explores the relationship between whiteness and race and culture in an international, multiracial, cross-class, and gendered terrain, and explores its sociological, anthropological, literary, and political dimensions.
Journal ArticleDOI
No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture.
Michael Bérubé,Andrew Ross +1 more
TL;DR: Andrew Ross as discussed by the authors argues that the making of "taste" is hardly an aesthetic activity, but rather an exercise in cultural power, policing and carefully redefining social relations between classes.