Archive for February 2023

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[Commlist] CfP: Humour and Conflict in the Global South

Tue Feb 21 14:52:57 GMT 2023






33rd Annual Conference of the International Society for Humor Studies
July 3-7, 2023, University of Boston, USA

*Call for papers: Humour and Conflict in the Global South*

Humour is traditionally associated with conflictive situations, whether the subjugation of someone (superiority), the frustration of an expectation (incongruity), or the discharge of an aggressive and/or antisocial energy (relief). In these approaches, conflict is primarily considered as an element that causes or enables comic enjoyment. Humour has also been understood as something that is not actually threatening but only has the "flavor of being threatening" (Veatch, 1998, p. 175) and therefore ceases to be personally attacking. Recent debates question this kind of understanding and emphasise the "dangerous" consequences of humour and comedy in contemporary times (Berlant & Ngai, 2017), especially when politically instrumentalized (Weaver, 2021; Nagle, 2017) or when used to mock minority populations (Perez, 2022; Davies & Ilott, 2018). All these debates, however, have mostly relied on analyses of cultural texts produced in the Global North.

In the Global South, the relationship between humour and conflict is also reiterated and interrogated due to political polarisation and instability, culture wars, and rampant identity politics. Yet, these phenomena are intersected by historical, social, and political factors which are distinct from those mapped and discussed in the literature on the Global North. Divisions along the lines of class, race, caste, gender, sexuality, and religion continue to inform public discourse, economics, and politics of the South. As a tool, humour can be used to douse or exacerbate conflict. It can be a vehicle for education, misinformation, and sometimes even disinformation. It can be used to oppress, oppose, resist or just survive. In a context where politically divisive statements serve as punchlines for those in positions of power while humorists face jarring repercussions for their performances, it seems urgent to question and understand the bellicose potential of humour in the social and political contexts of historically marginalised regions of the world.

These regions are brought together here not because we understand them as a monolith, but because, even though they are a complex collection of peoples and nations across different continents, they share common historical, social, and political patterns of underrepresentation, exploitation, and marginalisation. These issues have been addressed by an emerging production of humour scholarship developed from and/or about the Global South (see Mpofu, 2021, Perera & Pathak, 2022 and Trindade 2020). However, this production is currently dispersed, as it has not yet been articulated in a common research framework tailored around Global South contexts.

This panel aims to bring together researchers who are developing theoretical or empirical approaches to attend to the contemporary relationships between humour and conflict in the Global South. The panel will function as a privileged space to discuss the specificities of humour studies undertaken in peripheral countries, identify key research gaps, and propose pathways for further study. We invite scholars who use conflict (directly or indirectly) as an axis to understand humour in the Global South to present findings from ongoing/recently finished research projects.

Please submit a 250-word abstract along with a brief bio by *_24 Feb 2023 _*to: (diego.hoefel /at/ ufc.br) <mailto:(diego.hoefel /at/ ufc.br)>, (joao.capelotti /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(joao.capelotti /at/ gmail.com)> & (rujutadate /at/ protonmail.com) <mailto:(rujutadate /at/ protonmail.com)>
Notification of acceptance into panel proposal: 01 March 2023

*Organizers:* Diego Hoefel (UFC/Brazil), João Paulo Capelotti (UFPR/Brazil), Rujuta Date (SSLA/India) ISHS 2023 Conference: https://combeyond.bu.edu/offering/international-society-of-humor-studies-conference-2023/ <https://combeyond.bu.edu/offering/international-society-of-humor-studies-conference-2023/>

*Note:* The terms Global North and Global South are not strictly geographical, rather they should be understood as nations, regions, or peoples that exist within certain power dynamics as created by the past (colonialism, imperialism) and maintained by the conditions of the present (globalisation, global capitalism).

*References*
Berlant, L. & Ngai, S. (2017). Comedy Has Issues. Critical Inquiry 43, pp. 233-249. doi: 10.1086/689666 Davies, H., & Ilott, S. (Eds.). (2019). Comedy and the Politics of Representation: Mocking the Weak. Palgrave Macmillan. Mpofu, S. (Ed.). (2021). The politics of laughter in the Social Media Age: Perspectives from the global south. Springer International Publishing AG. Nagle, A. (2017). Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Zero Books. Perera, S., & Pathak, D. N. (Eds.). (2022). Humour and the Performance of Power in South Asia: Anxiety, Laughter and Politics in Unstable Times. Routledge. Perez, R. (2022). The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy. Stanford University Press. Trindade, L. V. (2020). No Laughing Matter: Race Joking and Resistance in Brazilian Social Media. Vernon Press. Veatch, T., (1998). A Theory of Humor. Humor, pp. 161-215. doi: 10.1515/humr.1998.11.2.161 Weaver, S. (2021). Images of Populism and Anti-Populism in United Kingdom National Newspapers about Brexit. Brunel University

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