Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/8949
Title: | The 'Other' laughs back: Humour and resistance in anti-racist comedy |
Authors: | Weaver, S |
Keywords: | Ambivalence;Comedy;Humour;Reverse discourse;Rhetoric |
Issue Date: | 2010 |
Publisher: | Sage |
Citation: | Sociology, 44(1), 31 - 48, 2010 |
Abstract: | This article outlines the ‘reverse discourses’ of black, African-American and Afro-Caribbean comedians in the UK and USA. These reverse discourses appear in comic acts that employ the sign-systems of embodied and cultural racism but develop, or seek to develop, a reverse semantic effect. I argue the humour of reverse discourse is significant in relation to racism because it forms a type of resistance that can, first, act rhetorically against racist meaning and so attack racist truth claims and points of ambivalence. Second, and connected to this, it can rhetorically resolve the ambiguity of the reverse discourse itself. Alongside this, and paradoxically, reverse discourses also contain a polysemic element that can, at times, reproduce racism. The article seeks to develop a means of analysing the relationship between racist and non-racist meaning in such comedic performance. |
Description: | This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2010 The Author. |
URI: | http://soc.sagepub.com/content/44/1/31 http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/8949 |
DOI: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0038038509351624 |
ISSN: | 0038-0385 |
Appears in Collections: | Sociology Dept of Social and Political Sciences Research Papers |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Fulltext.pdf | 557.56 kB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
Items in BURA are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.