Satirical Critique Research Articles

The politics and limitations of Afrodiasporic humour: Elnathan John’s Be(com)ing Nigerian

This article examines the politicisation and limitations of Afrodiasporic humour in Elnathan John’s 2019 text: Be(com)ing Nigerian. Although most literary commentators tend to categorise this satirical guide as a novel, it does not follow the plot structure of a conventional prose narrative. Rather, John models his text on ethics and aesthetics of Onitsha pamphlet literature, a popular culture tradition which flourished during the colonial epoch. My central argument is that John’s satirical critique of Nigerian national identity does not only elicit the reader’s laughter, but also challenges his fellow citizens to recalibrate their cultural ethics, in order to achieve a self-improvement agency both individually and collectively. In providing this self-improvement guidance, John effectively invests the reader’s aesthetic sensibility with an ideological hermeneutic, which underpins, and so enables, a vicarious satirical critique of what it means to be Nigerian in different socio-political contexts. I therefore demonstrate how John deploys colonial and Eurocentric clichés, biblical imagery and rhetoric, irony, sarcasm, parody, and hyperbole to satirise the constructedness, complexities, and ambiguities of a Nigerian identity born out of British colonialism and post-independence misrule of both military and civilian dictatorships. For insofar as form dialectically overlaps with theme, John’s self-improvement guide is ineluctably embedded with a satirical politics and poetics. That is, as a Nigerian diasporic writer who currently lives and works in Germany, John inhabits a transcultural space between the local and the global, from which he satirises both indigenous and Western values. I also contend that John’s transcultural ambivalence reveals the limitations of his Afrodiasporic humour, since Nigeria’s ethnic diversity implies cultural incommensurability and potential audience conflict. I then conclude by reflecting on how John’s satirical guide adumbrates the production, circulation, and critical reception of African postcolonial humour, a genre which remains largely undertheorised.

THE POLITICS OF CUISINE: PORTRAYAL OF FOOD CULTURE IN THE CARTOONS OF TOMS

Culture is a way of living encoded in dress, food, religion, values, and more subjectively practised in a human society. As a medium of portraying the everyday cultural and social happenings in the society, cartoons serve as a subtle and satiric critique of the same. Cuisine is a multisensory experience, inevitable as a daily need but often undervalued in the semiotic signification it entails. Food defines communal as well as territorial or regional identity. It is a potent symbol of the dynamics of gender, space, and identity. The social, cultural, and economic aspects of a society influence the food the people eat. This aspect of food is evaluated in this paper as reflected in the cartoons of Cartoonist Toms. Toms covered a period of five decades in the cartoon sector of Kerala during the second half of the twentieth century with his social cartoon series, “Bobanum Moliyum”. Cooking is often presented either as a cumbersome task for women homemakers or as an essential part of the job of housemaids. The multitude of activities involved in the production of the final edible product has a direct association with the multi-layered politics within the society. The relevance of studying the culinary culture of a society is that food practices play a certain crucial role in understanding its culture in a varied perspective.

Toxic Love: Gender and Genre in Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph

How can so exemplary a heroine of sensibility as Sidney be so brutally punished in an apparently typical conduct fiction like Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761)? This essay locates one cause for the novel’s unsatisfying effect in the hostility depicted between the sexes, which undermines the novel’s conduct-fiction moral code. Through close reading informed by queer theory and social history, I argue that all the major characters experience relationships poisoned by conflicting loyalties and interests—in familial bonds, homosocial friendships between pairs of both men and women, and heterosexual affairs. The emotional dysfunctionality of these social relations reflects the eighteenth-century cultural confusion over such issues as the social value of sensibility, the nature of sentimental friendship and its relationship to same-sex relations and to heterosexual unions. The account of these toxic rivalries suggests that this novel offers a satirical critique of conduct fiction because the genre endorses an anti-feminist ideology predicated on gender division.

The Clothes Maketh the Cult

The Clothes Maketh the Cult

On Second Thought

Editorial| March 09 2023 On Second Thought Studies in American Humor (2023) 9 (1): 4–12. https://doi.org/10.5325/studamerhumor.9.1.0004 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation On Second Thought. Studies in American Humor 9 March 2023; 9 (1): 4–12. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/studamerhumor.9.1.0004 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressStudies in American Humor Search Advanced Search Editors:Reading Grace Heneks’s analysis of the Black satirical critique of the white embrace of postracialism in “‘We Cool?’ Satirizing Whiteness in Obama-Era Black Satire” made me think of Richard Pryor’s lament in his 1976 routine Bicentennial Prayer: “How long will this bullshit go on?”1 Heneks’s article documents the practices of casual racism, drawing on Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s concept of new racism, thereby pointing to the fine line between white liberalism and white supremacy: the white liberal fears being called racist; the white supremacist fears a truly postracial and pluralistic society. Both choose silence to maintain the status quo. White claims that we have entered an era of postracialialty—white claims, because Black folks know the idea is “bullshit”—shut down needed discussions of ongoing racial hierarchy and seek to make invisible the harm done by racism to those deemed “other” to whiteness. Heneks’s analysis of Key & Peele’s “Apologies” sketch... You do not currently have access to this content.

Introduction

European Comic Art 16.1 was not planned as a themed issue, but the articles by our contributors nonetheless touch on some recurring themes: the close relationship between comics and caricature, the capacity of the medium for political and satirical critique, and its cultural ostracism. There is also a notable focus on comics as a transnational medium.

Echoes from "Fight Club"

This work addresses Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Adjustment Day as a satirical critique of the political radicalization of the USA and as a warning about the dangerous ideological effects narratives may have on our posthumanist understanding of reality. To reach his purposes, the novelist combines three stylistic strategies. First, he creates a satirical story that exposes the condition of American politics, the dangers of radicalized political correctness, and the present risks of populist revolutions. Secondly, he uses explicit metafictional references to Fight Club and to other literary works and critical theories to warn about the dangerous effects that the power of narrative can have. Finally, Palahniuk departs from the minimalist style he used in his earlier and most well-known fiction in favor of a heterodiegetic and omniscience narrative voice that, combined with multiple internal focalizations, endorses a plural, non-categorical understanding of reality.

Review: The Transcendentalists and Their World, by Robert A. Gross

Review: <i>The Transcendentalists and Their World</i>, by Robert A. Gross

A Pragmatic Study of Political Cartoons in Al-Ahram Weekly Newspaper

During the past century, political cartoons were considered as the most extreme form of expression in newspapers, as they were not committed to any norm of journalistic objectivity, or even the domain of objective reality. Some cartoonists consider political cartoons as historical sources of satirical critique of the political status quo. Generally speaking, there are various forms of cartoons, such as political, social, and humorous cartoons. Each one has a different function.&#x0D; The function of political cartoons lies in making a real change in a society in favor of suppressed classes through criticizing the status quo and unjust practices in political life. In addition, cartoons help newspapers and magazines look better by taking some space among columns of words which might be boring for the reader. At the same time, political cartoons have real contributions in affirming the role newspapers play as means of communication between a reader and a cartoonist. Political cartoons are also capable of bold dealing with different societal problems as they can escape different types of censorship. Thus, political cartoons have the mechanisms to correct the negatives of a society faster than written words, especially they are easily understood by readers.&#x0D; As cartoons are viewed as methods of communication, pragmatics is also concerned with determining the elements of communicational content, which are essential to interpretation. It is quite common for an utterance to display a number of pragmatic features. Hence, it is clear that pragmatics plays a key role in the interpretation of the communication process represented by the cartoons' language. This communication process, whether verbal or non-verbal, includes expressions and recognition of intentions. From this perspective, pragmatic interpretation is simply an exercise in which a reader infers a cartoonist’s intended meaning from his cartoon.&#x0D; Within this framework, this study tries to discuss the aspects of the implicit meanings in the language of political cartoons. The importance of the study is obviously shown by shedding light on the role of the language that can be employed to convey explicit and also implicit meaning by pragmatic devices. This study, therefore, attempts to clarify the role of pragmatic devices in explaining the hidden meaning in political cartoons. In doing so, it tries to emphasize the importance of implicature in the language of political cartoons, whether it abides or flouts Gricean’s maxims with its effect to convey the meaning. Also, it attempts to figure out why cartoonists frequently use this aspect of pragmatics in writing the language. Another goal of this study is to explain the role of speech acts, whether used directly or indirectly, and why a cartoonist sometimes uses the literal and sometimes prefers to use non-literal speech acts.&#x0D; Moreover, this study underscores the importance of the distinction between language use and linguistic meaning. Besides, it asserts a parallel distinction between speaker's reference and linguistic reference, which provokes the assumption to what extent linguistic expressions refer independently to speaker's use of them. In addition, this thesis attempts to consider the politeness phenomenon as a pragmatic device, and its role in understanding the meaning. &#x0D; Given the distance between a cartoonist and his addressees, this study sheds light on how language users sometimes depart from the conditions of optimal information exchange which may cause confusion. In addition, this thesis emphasizes the function of deictic expressions and the role of presupposition with its relation to the implicature. In short, it shows the linguistic insights of implicit meanings employed in cartoons and attempts to discover whether or not cartoonists succeed in conveying the meaning to the addressees by employing pragmatic devices.

“Electrical Nutrition and Glandular Control”: Eugenics, Progressive Science, and George Schuyler’s Black No More

In 1931, African American journalist George Schuyler imagined a medical treatment that could turn Black people white and American politics upside down. Schuyler’s novel, Black No More, uses this fictional race-altering technology to mount a satirical critique of progressive era investment in eugenic science as a tool of social reform. The novel draws on popular scientific theories of human perfection—electric medicine, hygienic nutrition, and glandular theory—to envision a mode of technological reproduction that troubles eugenic theories of biological inheritance and parodies the progressive marriage of politics and science. In reading Schuyler’s contrarian engagement with American race science through the novel’s use of medical technology, the essay extends critical discourse on the relationship between eugenics, progressive politics, and racial uplift in the early twentieth century. Bringing the politics of the past to bear on the present, it advances a critique of the persistent cultural legacy of progressive era scientific thought.

Witty Shrews and Shrewish Wits

Abstract This essay analyzes the devices and methods of satirical discourse as they are presented by Much Ado About Nothing’s Beatrice and The Taming of the Shrew’s Katherine. By exploring shared points of contact in the “flyting” scenes between Katherine, Beatrice, and their respective suitors, I discuss how ironic, critical speech comes to be elevated as satirical wit in one play, even as it is reduced to shrewish complaint in the other. Both readings complicate conventional understandings of these plays as comedy, especially insofar as they undercut the institution associated with the genre’s successful resolution: marriage. Ado’s and Shrew’s engagement in discourses of satire, complaint, and invective offers an opportunity to recognize how these plays figure women and marriage as vehicles for a satirical critique of the period’s comedic and romantic conventions.

"Os poemas ficam nonsense": Canonical Gender in Angélica Freitas' Um útero é do tamanho de um punho

Um útero é do tamanho de un punho (2012) is a worthy successor of Freitas’ inaugural book of poems, Rilke Shake. It maintains the fighting wit that characterized Rilke Shake, but situates Freitas’ satirical critique within the female body. As the title indicates, Freitas writes from a position of unapologetic womanhood, aligning the uterus with the fist and thus reconfiguring the symbol of woman’s reproductive potential with the promise of belligerent transformation. The poems in the collection satirize notions of gender essentialism, heteronormativity, and gender performance by deploying a quotidian female subjectivity that engages in a categorical resistance to externally imposed expectations. The link between the two projects is visible throughout Um útero’s many poems, but it is accomplished most immediately in its epigraph. The pair of quotes selected—a line from a well-known German opera song titled “Seeräuber Jenny,” and the satirical phrase, i piri qui—condense and contain Freitas’ ideological stance. This paper will examine how the tension generated by the two quotes, each independently ensnared in a rich history of mockery, results in a sophisticated critique that utilizes humor and the Western literary canon to reveal the canonical construction of gender.

The answerability of false hope: Examining the unexpected outcomes of the Finnexia® public art intervention

This article examines the unexpected ethical issues that emerged from Finnexia ® , a performance art intervention. Finnexia consisted of an advertisement campaign for a fictitious medication that helps people learn the Finnish language. Presented in the Helsinki Central Railway Station, the Finnexia performance aimed to generate a space for public dialogue about the experience of immigrants in Finland and the process of learning the Finnish language. On a secondary level, Finnexia presented a satirical critique towards the excess of medicalization in society. Through a detailed description of the Finnexia performance and its outcomes, the author examines the complexity of ethical issues that emerged from the Finnexia performance. The responsibility of the artist is discussed in the context of public performance in art practice and in artistic research. The author proposes that artists approach ethical considerations during the creative process through self-reflection, dialogue with fellow performers and in consultation with experts in the field.

“I always place my bet on Red”: Comrade Detective and the Spectre of Communism

The paper analyses the buddy cop TV show Comrade Detective in the light of Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1994) to demonstrate how it launches a satiric critique of the American state and diplomatic machinery in the aftermath of the fall of the Second Bloc. I argue that this visual text, released in 2017, addresses three contemporary global concerns—the dominance of the USA in a unipolar world, the neoliberal celebration of consumerism, and finally, the rise of right-wing religious fanaticism—through a satiric recreation of the bygone regime of communist Romania of the 1980s.

Crazy Funny: Popular Black Satire and The Methods of MadnessLaughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century

Crazy Funny: Popular Black Satire and The Methods of MadnessLaughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century

Crazy Funny: Popular Black Satire and The Methods of MadnessLaughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century

Crazy Funny: Popular Black Satire and The Methods of MadnessLaughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century

Japan through Western eyes in Stupeur et Tremblements by Amélie Nothomb: Interpretation prevailing over translation

AbstractAmélie Nothomb's 1999 novel Stupeur et Tremblements portrays the misadventures, misunderstandings, and misgivings experienced by a Belgian professional in a large, modern Japanese workplace. This book is often read as an autobiographical account of the author's Japanese experience and a satirical critique of Japanese society. I argue that, while the narrator is unable to perform the duty for which she was hired, as a translator, she acts as an interpreter of Japanese mores. Always and indelibly perceived within the boundaries of Western culture in the novel, Japan becomes a stylised construct replete with references to Western concepts. My article sheds light on how this construct takes shape in the text by focusing on the narrative techniques that foreground the narrator's immersion in Western culture, including allusions to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, paraphrasing and injecting meaning, namedropping key Western figures and concepts, and using the eye as a recurring motif and metaphor.

“Women Must Weep—Or Unite Against War”: Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Critique of Classical Epic in To the Lighthouse

Previous scholarship on Virginia Woolf’s classicism has acknowledged her debt to Vergil primarily in the context of the Eclogues or Georgics, and her debt to classical epic as a genre rarely and sparsely. Tremper (1992) and Tudeau-Clayton (2006) have both suggested a reading of “The Lighthouse,” the third part of To the Lighthouse, as an example of modernist epic. This paper, conversely, proposes that the novel in its entirety functions as a satirical critique of epic, specifically of Vergil’s Aeneid, with the goal of demonstrating the pitfalls of epic ideology as it impacted English society during the First World War.

Marx’s Minerva: sex, socialism and Soviet Russia in Matilde de la Torre’s El banquete de Saturno: Novela social (1931)

ABSTRACT Focusing on the 1931 novel El banquete de Saturno: Novela social by Matilde de la Torre, one of the first diputadas in Spain, this article explores the feminist subtexts of a narrative that centres on a workers’ revolution dominated by male characters. In the novel, which is fundamentally a satirical critique of the Russian Revolution and Soviet Union that highlights the disastrous consequences that arise when socialist ideals are misrepresented, De la Torre reflects on socialist doctrine, women’s political autonomy and the debates and policies of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) – the party she officially joined in 1931 and would represent after winning a seat in the 1933 and 1936 elections. Drawing on a range of sources to contextualize the subject matter of the novel, including Marxist writings and criticism, socialist literary models, Spanish travelogues about Soviet Russia and feminist Marxist scholarship, I argue that De la Torre uses El banquete as a means of contributing to contemporary political debates, proposing a reconceptualization of socialist rhetoric and policy that would benefit from female input.

Fire in the jungle: Genocide and colonization in Russell and Pugh’s The Flintstones

Mark Russell and Steve Pugh’s The Flintstones comic book (2016–17) addresses US colonialism much more directly than most popular media but focalizes its story through a white, settler American. Thus, it represents an unwillingness and/or inability to think outside of that narrow perspective, i.e. while it is anti-colonial, it is not postcolonial. The book was published through a licensing agreement between Hanna-Barbara and DC Comics in which several Hanna-Barbera cartoons were combined with contrasting genres to create grim and/or mature stories. DC’s The Flintstones, in particular, takes on a collection of social issues, including religion as cynical manipulation, military-industrial propaganda, exploitation of foreign/immigrant labour and media depictions of the environmental crisis. However, it consistently undermines its own messages, often through visual jokes that end up confirming the ideas the book satirizes but also through sincere pronouncements that prevent the satirical critique from reaching a concrete conclusion. The overarching narrative of the series is about the lingering trauma of colonization. It equates the colonization of the land presently held by United States with that country’s war in Vietnam. This equation results from depicting the literal colonization of an Indigenous space and land but using imagery that reflects US media depictions of their war in Vietnam: colonialist soldiers in green fatigues use fire (i.e. napalm) to exterminate racist caricatures of Southeast Asian guerrilla fighters in order to clear a forest and expose the literal bedrock from which the Flinstone’s city will be built. Fred Flintstone, who represents a settler American, states quite directly that he ‘participated in a genocide’ as a soldier in that invasion, thus confirming an anti-colonialist critique. However, the book never takes on the perspective of the colonized peoples, who by then have been wiped out, which is why it stops short of a postcolonialist critique.