"An unusual accommodation" : affect, reason, and relationality in black humor
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- An Unusual Accommodation advances a theory of black political humor that deviates from established and under-contested interpretations of black comedic response to racial oppression. With attention to the affective, logical, and relational dimensions of humor, this study challenges the premise that black humor proceeding from and attending to conditions of racial subjugation must be enacted as a cathartic exercise in grief and rage; as a counter-narrative clarifying the utter absurdity and illogic of racism; or as a ritual of antagonistic counter-objectification. Looking to comedic film, literature, and stand-up performance, this dissertation instead proposes a "Humor of Unusual Accommodation" which finds black humorists approaching anti-blackness in subtle, riskily unusual ways. More specifically, the sense of humor observed among the black cultural producers of this study is animated by non-cathartic affects like curiosity, which conjures amusement toward and amidst the troubles of black social and political life, maintaining a critical emotive distance that stops just short of resigned and yielding apathy but avoids the presumed cathartic affects of black rage and grief. This sense of humor also derives from an agonistic pluralism whereby the legitimacy of white anti-black logics and ideological grammars are acknowledged alongside the legitimacy of directly opposing (pro-)black views, and the plurality of legitimacy is itself a rich source of comedy. In that the subjects/objects among and against whom racial ideologies are expressed or carried out are positioned in highly consequential, power-inflected relationships, the Humor of Unusual Accommodation also privileges an adversarial relation, a positionality that does not recuperate or reverse the subject/object positions of whiteness and blackness nor feigns a systemic leveling of the dynamics of racial power, but it does allow for shared oppositional laughter in an unironic "face-to-face" relation. Closely reading texts like Toni Morrison's Sula, the stand-up comedy of Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, and Dominique Witten, and the sly humor lacing jazz genius Sun Ra's Space is the Place, this dissertation and the comedic objects explored therein hazard a set of political lessons that, despite their precarious proximity to surrender, ultimately offer a viable method of comedic coping amid the inevitabilities of racial struggle.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Caruthers, Jakeya D |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Graduate School of Education. |
| Primary advisor | McDermott, Ray (Raymond Patrick), 1946- |
| Thesis advisor | McDermott, Ray (Raymond Patrick), 1946- |
| Thesis advisor | Anderson, Patrick |
| Thesis advisor | Antonio, Anthony Lising, 1966- |
| Thesis advisor | Menon, Jisha, 1972- |
| Advisor | Anderson, Patrick |
| Advisor | Antonio, Anthony Lising, 1966- |
| Advisor | Menon, Jisha, 1972- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Jakeya D. Caruthers. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Graduate School of Education. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2016 by Jakeya Danielle Caruthers
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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