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[ecrea] CFP: ASA 2015: The (Re)production of Misery and the Ways of Resistance

Fri Jan 09 00:28:22 GMT 2015




Not Funny, Not Fun: Unlaughter, Anti-Jokes, and the Empire’s Others



Let us think about contemporary subjects who do not laugh and refuse to have fun according to popular culture: feminists (really, women in general), the devout (but Muslims specifically), and career activists (especially activists of color). In classical comedy, the non-laughing subject, often a braggart or a pedant with his excess of bile, was an essential foil for the fun-loving civil subjects who would triumph in love and fortune at the end. Daniel Wickberg has tracked the rise of “sense of humor" as a quality required of the newly flexible bourgeois subject in the late capitalist West. This rise has inevitably depended on the creation of various others with undesirable communicative performances, marked by unlaughter, and an unwillingness to make or take a joke. While laughter and jokes have been studied in depth in various fields, most notably Folklore, unlaughter – not simply the absence of laughter but a definite response on its own right, according to Moira Smith – deserves more scrutiny.


This proposed panel seeks to explore how ideas about lack of humor have functioned and continue to operate in transnational context as a resource for the construction of normative American identities. It also asks how various subgenres of anti-humor, unlaughter, and anti-joking can mark moments of resistance or operate as resignations to the order, locally and globally.


Please submit paper abstracts (250 words) and brief C.V. to Perin Gurel ((pgurel /at/ nd.edu)) by January 22, 2015.


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Perin Gurel, Ph.D
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Assistant Professor of American Studies
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN
Yale Initiative for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religions



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