Laughter's Fury: The Double Bind of Black Laughter
Millan, Diego.
2016
-
Abstract: Laughter's Fury advances two major claims: that western
philosophical and cultural traditions marginalize Blackness within theories of laughter,
and that laughter's sonic disruptiveness contributes to the intellectual development of a
Black radical consciousness. Reading theories of laughter alongside black literature of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this project bridges ... read morethe two historically separate
strands of scholarship - Black Studies and Humor Studies. The disproportionate way in which
humor scholars fasten laughter to affects such as joy overinvests laughter with a sense of
goodness; consequently, this idea of laughter as an act of affirmation occludes how
laughter operates in modes of protest and rebellion. Most theories of comedy uphold an
Aristotelian premise that laughter is "essentially human," which extends laughter's status
as good to the safeguarding of Western definitions of the human. Yet as scholars such as
Sylvia Wynter and Saidiya Hartman have illustrated, the emergence of Western civilization
and liberal humanism depended on the violent, repeated repudiation of blackness and of
Black subjectivity. I ground my project in the perspective granted by this foundation in
critical theory and cultural analysis to examine laughter's role in securing the boundaries
of the human and examine the double bind of black laughter within the US cultural imaginary
- the impasse that appears when laughter is associated with life and positivity by a
culture that equates Blackness with negativity and death. I examine the ways that laughter
circulates within a Black cultural imaginary in relation to a diverse and interdisciplinary
range of sources: literary, historical, and theoretical. Calling upon these varied sources,
each chapter traces a different avenue for considering laughter's role in Black literature:
undoing western epistemology (chapter one), crafting a literary voice (chapter two), and
revising historical narrative (chapter three). In particular, I examine Black laughter as
an expression of Frantz Fanon's anticolonial praxis developed across his four published
texts; the significance of voice in antebellum Black American literature, especially James
McCune Smith's pseudonymous writings and Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends; and
the redefining of Black laughter within Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition and its
revision of the 1898 Wilmington Riot
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2016.
Submitted to the Dept. of English.
Advisor: Christina Sharpe.
Committee: Greg Thomas, Joseph Litvak, and Sandy Alexandre.
Keywords: American literature, Black studies, and American studies.read less - ID:
- p8419054n
- Component ID:
- tufts:21262
- To Cite:
- TARC Citation Guide EndNote
