Satirical Response Research Articles

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Pope, and the York Connection

Both of the writers involved in a famous literary quarrel, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Alexander Pope, had a number of contacts with Yorkshire, largely ignored until now. For Montagu, these include her residence in York in 1713–1714, adjacent to what became the Knavesmire course; her youthful involvement in racing; her support of attempts by her husband, Edward Wortley Montagu, to obtain a parliamentary seat in the county, as late as 1734; and the ongoing presence throughout the couple’s career of figures prominent in the political and sporting life of the district, some of them from families well known to Montagu from her childhood. For Pope the relevant data spring from his lasting friendship with the local magnate, Lord Burlington, and his close relations with a set of Burlingtonian devotees based around York, with whom he discussed local affairs. Matters came to a head in 1731 and 1732, with Pope’s controversial Epistle to Burlington, together with its hostile reception; a satirical response from Pope to his critics, A Master Key to Popery, also little explored in scholarship; and the first meeting at the Knavesmire course, together with the opening of the York Assembly Rooms, designed by Burlington. These two events, widely reported in the press, were attended by groups familiar to Montagu and to Pope. Detailed analysis suggests that an unexplained reference to ‘Lady Knaves-Acre’ in Pope’s Master Key may well be another barb directed at Montagu, that proceeds from his knowledge of some key episodes connecting her with Yorkshire.

Laughing at Architecture: Architectural Histories of Humour, Satire and Wit

Laughing at Architecture: Architectural Histories of Humour, Satire and Wit

A Chivalric Show of Civic Virtue: The Society of Prince Arthur’s Archers

Abstract This article explores civic pageantry’s role in detaching King Arthur and aspects of the Arthurian world from the narratives of the medieval tradition by examining the Society of Prince Arthur’s show, a popular event hosted by an archery fraternity in late sixteenth-century London. The processional nature of the Society’s annual show, the account of the Society provided by Richard Mulcaster, and readers’ annotations in copies of Richard Robinson’s The Ancient Order, Societie, and Unitie Laudable of Prince Arthure and his knightly armory of the Round Table (1583) reveal the importance of performance in the early modern reimagining of Arthur and his knights as symbols of civic virtue. The Society’s adaptations of Arthurian characters and the chivalry of the Round Table thus influence both satirical responses to chivalric literature in the period and Edmund Spenser’s presentation of the Arthurian legend in The Faerie Queene (1590).

The Provocation of Art that is Seen and Not Read: Herwarth Walden's Appropriation of the Tauentzien Girls

As editor of Der Sturm, the most innovative art review of the 1910s, Herwarth Walden became known for promoting abstraction. But he developed his ideas on modern art while editing periodicals of the theater industry, and his engagement with performance art shaped his approach to visual art. This essay considers how Walden's satirical response to a moralizing crusade against unchaperoned schoolgirls frequenting a posh shopping street drew on his ideal of art defined not by abstraction but manifestation: the superficial expression of inner spirit in material form.

Monumental Jesus: Landscapes of Faith and Doubt in Modern America by Margaret M. Grubiak

Reviewed by: Monumental Jesus: Landscapes of Faith and Doubt in Modern America by Margaret M. Grubiak Karen E. Park Monumental Jesus: Landscapes of Faith and Doubt in Modern America. By Margaret M. Grubiak. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2020 Monumental Jesus: Landscapes of Faith and Doubt in Modern America is a fascinating exploration of some of the most iconic American Christian landmarks of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries including Notre Dame's famous, "Touchdown Jesus," Answers in Genesis's Creation Museum and Ark Experience, and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's now defunct Christian amusement park, Heritage USA. Grubiak's approach to these sites and the others treated in the book, complements the work of scholars of sacred space and material religion including Colleen McDannell, David Morgan, James Bielo, and others who seek to understand the ways in which believers inscribe meaning onto buildings, landscapes, and other material objects and spaces. In Monumental Jesus, landscapes of faith (murals, statues, Christian amusement parks) are interpreted alongside landscapes of doubt—a category which includes all manner of outsider reactions to the religious buildings and sites—reactions which range from good-natured nicknames to outright ridicule, scorn, and derision. This approach recognizes that meaning is not only made or controlled by those insiders and believers who build and then worship at or frequent these sites, but by outsiders who are "involuntarily confronted by religious buildings in the course of daily life." Where do silly nicknames, derisive graffiti, satirical comic strips, and scathing Architectural Digest reviews fit into [End Page 108] the landscape of religious meaning? This is the question Grubiak sets out to address. The book is divided into five chapters of varying lengths ranging from approximately 40 pages to as few as ten. The first chapter explores the phenomenon of "Touchdown Jesus," the enormous Word of Life mural on the Theodore M. Hesburgh Library visible from the football stadium. While this mural and its meaning has been addressed by other scholars, here Grubiak deftly explores the tension between the intended meaning of the mural—a bold assertion of the seriousness and authority of the Catholic intellectual tradition—and the silliness and even blasphemy of the simultaneous assertion that Jesus cares about and exerts an influence over his favorite football team. Catholic insiders can simultaneously believe and doubt when it comes to "Touchdown Jesus'' and this "landscape of doubt" provides Grubiak with a fruitful site for the exploration of religious meaning. The first chapter is the only one which deals with a Catholic setting. The other examples, with the exception of the Mormon Temple outside of Washington, DC, come from various corners of evangelical Protestantism. The lengthy chapter on Heritage USA and Oral Roberts University is particularly strong, as is the chapter on the Creation Museum and Ark Experience. Grubiak's reading of these sites demonstrates her deep knowledge and familiarity with architectural history—her description of the various architectural styles used at Heritage USA and their meanings made me wish the place had survived so I could visit it. Similarly, the chapter on the Creation Museum and Ark Experience could stand alone as an architectural and material exploration of those sites and the controversy surrounding them, and would be useful in an undergraduate class on Religion in America, Religion in Popular Culture, or Religion and Sacred Space. The book is notable for its many illustrations and photographs, and where permission was not granted (for example in the case of MAD Magazine's satirical response to the Creation Museum) Grubiak encourages her readers to look the images up online in order to follow her interpretation, which I did and found very helpful. The bibliography and notes are also particularly strong. The final chapter, on the giant Jesus "Christ of the Ozarks" is quite short and while it raises important questions about the anti-Semitism and racist hatred of the statue's originator, it is unable to adequately engage with these questions, asking whether visitors are "unwillingly complicit in the perversion of Christian beliefs in their consumption of this evangelical theme park" without fully dealing with that important question. Racist and anti-semitic Christian beliefs are, sadly, Christian beliefs nonetheless...

Laughing alone, together: local user-generated satirical responses to a global event

ABSTRACT This paper presents a first systematic analysis and conceptualization of local comic responses to global events, as articulated by internet users. We probed the multifaceted interactions between the global-local and entertaining-disruptive dimensions of contemporary satire through a cross-linguistic analysis of reactions to Donald Trumps’ election. Using a combination of qualitative methods, we analyzed humorous messages in Arabic, Chinese, English, German, and Spanish (n = 321) on Twitter and Weibo during November 2016. We found that globally shared themes are mainly apolitical and entertaining, while glocal responses align with three ideal types, which we term inbound, transitional, and outbound satire. Each type of satire featured a distinct combination of protagonists, targets and humor mechanisms. In conclusion, we discuss how cross-national satire on social media problematizes the (already murky) distinction between entertaining and disruptive satire, why satire is uniquely equipped to domesticate global affairs through estrangement, and how our typology may be linked to bilateral relations between countries in the contemporary international arena.

#HimToo and the networking of misogyny in the age of #MeToo

ABSTRACT This article brings together a quantitative approach which seeks to map and understand actor centrality and connectivity in relation to Twitter using social network analysis, with a qualitative set of interdisciplinary concerns around media representations of men’s sexual violence against women. Our focus is #HimToo, a short-lived Twitter-backlash to #MeToo concentrated around the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and confirmation. We explore how #HimToo flourished and floundered across two key periods: the first related to the broadcast confirmation hearings; the second a backlash triggered by a Kavanaugh-supporting mom. With a dataset of over 277,000 Tweets, we argue that the first period shows an actor-centric conservative engagement which is dominated by female commentators, but displays a male orientation. The second period presents both a serious and satirical response to the first. Whilst there is a significant reorientation of both activity and actors in this second period, we identify persistent gendered and generational patterns which warrant a more cautious response from feminist critics. We thus connect our analysis to debates about social media connectedness, gendered patterns of social media ab/use, and the role of social media in a highly polarised political climate in the USA.

President, Wrestler, Spectacle: An Examination of Donald Trump’s Firing Tweets and The Celebrity Appresident as Response to Trump’s Media Landscape

Between January and April 2017, the Trump administration underwent a period of extensive cabinet turnover that was publicized via Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. Accessibility to such information creates a “break” with the mythos of a president and raises questions concerning the relationship between presidential decorum and social media usage. Trump’s Twitter usage operates as a platform to reinforce populist rhetoric and pushes his various spectacles (e.g., entertainment, business, and presidency) through the notion of “winners” and “losers.” This conflation of Trump’s positions enables his Twitter usage to mimic the Barthian mythos of the wrestler, an overly aggressive figure that borders the line between pantomime and entertainer. Twitter also enables a space for satirical response, specifically through The Daily Show with Trevor Noah’s The Celebrity Appresident. As such, the nexus of Trump’s twitter behavior and satirical response is indicative of the current political climate that combines myth, spectacle, and social media.

Wordsworth, Shelley, and the Riddle of Peter Bell

In 1819 Shelley was moved to anger and derision when Wordsworth published Peter Bell. His satirical response was predicated on an ironically autobiographical interpretation of the poem, and in this respect, Shelley's reading of the poem merits further study with respect to both poets. Hazlitt, Keats, Lamb, and others, were quick to note the egotistical drive that informed Wordsworth's writing, but in Peter Bell the Third Shelley claimed that Wordsworth went far beyond that. He insisted that Wordsworth had unintentionally satirised himself with devastating accuracy in the manner of Thomas Moore's satire on political apostasy, The Fudge Family in Paris. Shelley's reading of the poem casts a fresh light on the importance of Peter Bell for an appreciation of the complexity of Wordsworth's development as a poet at the time of writing Lyrical Ballads, a complexity that relates both to the controversial style of Peter Bell, and to the ambivalent relationships within the poem between poet, narrator, protagonist, and reader.

Kissing a Photograph: Reproductive Panic in Kate Chopin and Thomas Hardy

Kissing a Photograph:Reproductive Panic in Kate Chopin and Thomas Hardy Arielle Zibrak (bio) The late-nineteenth-century writer Kate Chopin was fond of shocking people. It was perhaps for this reason that she kept a copy of Thomas Hardy's 1895 novel Jude the Obscure on display in her home.1 Her review of Jude, published in the St. Louis Criterion in 1897, begins with an anecdote about a polite female guest shocked to find the volume left out on a visiting-room table: "'Oh! how can you!' she exclaimed, 'with so many young people about!'"2 While this reaction clearly delights Chopin (her liberal use of exclamation points in the transcription is good evidence alone), she proceeds to trash Hardy's novel, stating outright that "the book is detestably bad" (714). Yet, in her prose, Chopin also betrays certain admiration for, or perhaps merely an uncomfortable identification with, the novel she purports to hate.3 When "one or two youngsters" ask her about the book, Chopin responds that it is "unutterably tiresome … but you might like it" (714). Indeed, her primary objection to the novel, reformulated and repeated throughout the review, is that it's incredibly boring: "ponderous … formidable … nothing alluring … the outward appearance of a Congressional Record … colorless … unpardonably dull" etc., etc. (713–14). She laments that no one was interested in the book prior to the controversy it stirred in the press, a controversy into which she, as yet another reviewer of the novel, has now entered; but under what terms? It seems rather irrelevant and late in the day to say all this about Jude the Obscure. It is only sympathy for the young person which moves me to do so. I hate to know that deceptions are being practiced upon him. He has been led to believe that the work is quite dangerous and alluring … I feel very sorry to think that he should part with so many good silver quarters and receive nothing in return but disappointment and dissolution. (715) [End Page 355] This ridiculous assertion of concern for "the young person" wasting his money on a boring novel is Chopin's satirical response to the overzealous parade of reviewers that felt compelled to damn Jude in both the English and American presses out of fear for what it might do to impressionable youths. Margaret Oliphant's notorious review in Blackwood's is a good example of this mode of criticism.4 Oliphant writes, "[T]o make [sex] the supreme incident, always in the foreground, to be discussed by young men and women, and held up before boys and girls … seems to me an outrage for which there is no justification."5 Chopin enters the debate not to defend the portrayal of sexuality in Jude, but rather to lament that the young reader who goes to the book in search of it will find little to gratify his or her curiosity. The performance of her own "outrage" at the dullness of Hardy's novel is less a gesture aimed at Hardy or Jude than it is a perverse counterstrike against reviewers who object to the "immorality" of novels that portray sexual desire. Chopin responds to the sex panic of Hardy's reviewers with an art panic of her own: our concern, she suggests, should be protecting the sanctity of children's minds from bad literature. In Sex Panic and the Punitive State (2011), Roger Lancaster outlines the social, cultural, and judicial power of sex panics from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Echoing Lee Edelman's 2004 polemic No Future, Lancaster asserts that "the constant element in successive waves of panic is the figure of the imperiled innocent child—a child whose innocence is defined in terms of his imagined sexlessness and whose protection from sex looms as an ever more urgent and exacting demand."6 This profoundly effective rhetoric is nowhere more present than in Oliphant's defamatory review. (And it is precisely this rhetoric that Chopin appropriates.) After repeatedly harping upon the dangers to young people that Jude and Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did (1895) pose, Oliphant laments the extermination of Jude and Sue's children, who...

Carnivalesque Homoeroticism in Medieval Decadent Cairo: Ibn Dāniyāl'sThe Love-Stricken One and the Lost One Who Inspires Passion

This study explores the theme of carnivalesque homoeroticism in medieval decadent Cairo as portrayed by oculist andlittérateurIbn Dāniyāl in his third shadow playThe Love-Stricken One and the Lost One Who Inspires Passion. The playwright's satirical response to Sultan Baybars's campaign against vice in Egypt in the thirteenth century falls within the irreverent burlesque tradition. The article analyses the playwright's carnivalesque and satirical shadow play in light of Bakhtin's theory of carnival. He related the carnivalesque – a burlesque dramatic genre aiming to secretively challenge and sabotage the social and political hierarchy of an autocratic regime through satirical obscenity and rhetoric – to the medieval carnivals and feasts of fools throughout Europe. Bawdy burlesque comedies were intended to provoke hilarious laughter by mockingly satirizing the despotic government's absurd subjugation of its citizens. The study shows how carnivalesque dialogic, long thought to be limited to medieval literature in Europe, found fertile soil in medieval Cairo. Ibn Dāniyāl's trilogyṬayf al-Khayāl, which consists ofThe Shadow Spirit,The Amazing Preacher and the Stranger, andThe Love-Stricken One and the Lost One Who Inspires Passion, can unquestionably be studied in the context of Bakhtin's plebeian popular culture of laughter and the carnivalesque tradition.

Will the Public Please Step Forward? Libel Law and Public Opinion in Byron’s The Vision of Judgment

THE LEGAL REPERCUSSIONS OF BYRON'S THE VISION OF JUDGMENT ARE well known. John Hunt, who had published poem in first issue of Liberal, was tried for libel, found guilty by jury, and sentenced to pay hundred pounds as well as to enter into securities for five years. (1) In many ways, prosecution was typical of period. Decided by special jury, trial involved a pair of witnesses and hinged on a reading of charged material. But there was a distinctive irony to targeting work for prosecution: Vision of Judgment a poem about limitations of judgment, inadequacy of representation, and prohibitive heterogeneity of public opinion. Considering his low opinion of English legal system, we might reasonably wonder why Byron retains judicial framework employed by his satirical target Robert Southey in A Vision of Judgement--complete with recognizable legal language and protocol--to censure Laureate and condemn late king. But whereas Southey employs framework to legitimize his judgment of George ill, trial Byron stages deliberately abortive. arguments are inconclusive, witnesses fail to provide any definitive testimony, and trial ultimately disintegrates, derailed as much by a defective process as by discordant poetry. While this result reflects on English legal system more broadly, poem engages with a specific judicial problem, that was highlighted by slew of libel trials that led up to publication of Vision: disconnect between public opinion and courtroom invocations of the people. In his Vision, Byron not simply repudiating Southey's verdict, but reimagining relationship between courtroom and public. By conspicuously failing to represent public opinion fully in heavenly trial, Vision of Judgment underscores representational limitations of judicial process--limitations that had become especially prominent in 1821. Criticism of libel law was intense when Byron conceived poem, in part because shifts in interpretation and prosecution of libel law had fundamentally compromised its application in courtroom. gradual implementation of 1792 Libel Act, which allowed jury to determine whether or not a work was libellous in nature, made trials increasingly dependent on invocation of public opinion. But in practice, effectively representing reading public in courtroom proved impossible, and libel prosecutions were required to make expansive claims (both implicit and explicit) to speak for English people--claims that were unavoidably specious and unsubstantiated. In his Vision, Byron deliberately reproduces central defect of contemporary libel trials, crucially premising heavenly trial on an abortive invocation of the people. A universal shoal of shades called to voice public attitude against late king, but conclusively representing sentiments of this motley crowd proves impossible, as neither Wilkes, Junius, nor Southey can move beyond their own private priorities and concerns. Accentuating failure of these key witnesses, Vision of Judgment foregrounds disjunction between individual witness and multifarious multitude, demonstrating that public opinion cannot be effectively reduced to one or two persons. (2) Though Byron's poem mirrors English legal system, none of existing scholarship on Vision of Judgment has considered poem's jurisprudential subtexts. For most of twentieth century, critics typically situated poem within a biographical narrative, treating it first and foremost as a satirical response to Robert Southey's A Vision of Judgement (1821). (3) The best introduction to Byron's Vision of Judgment of 1822, commentators have regularly suggested, is laureate poem which inspired it. (4) While this approach helped explain origins of poem, it necessarily left intellectual and historical contexts of Vision comparatively neglected. …

Writing Women: The Virtual Cookbook and Pinterest

This article aims to throw new light on the representation of women who cook as necessarily perpetuating a domestic ideology in which women are confined to the home. Traditionally, cookbooks written by women have disseminated both cooking information and rules and practices for running an effective household, which have contributed to the ideologies that underpin female domestic practice. However, the evolution of social media platforms, such as Pinterest, which enable the user to actively select and visually display culinary masterpieces on a digital pinboard, have provided a forum for women's voices and a novel means of expression that is available to the amateur cook and professional chef alike. This article will argue that the creation of a virtual cookbook, via Pinterest, is a means of empowering women, which is central to the lexicon of feminist debate. Rather than being the victims of domestic servitude, this article will argue that the women who create virtual cookbooks do so by choice, and as a means of pleasing the self, irrespective of achieving domestic or marital bliss.

Acting Authentically: Performance and Transnational Authenticity in Tchicaya U Tam'si's <em>The Glorious Destiny of Marshall Nnikon Nniku</em>

This article discusses Tchicaya U Tam’si’s The Glorious Destiny of Marshall Nnikon Nniku ( Le Destin glorieux du Marechal Nnikon Nniku, prince qu’on sort ) as a satirical response to the dictatorship of Joseph-Desire Mobutu and his policy of authenticity. I examine Mobutu’s authenticity campaign as a transnational phenomenon that involves accepting and performing international perceptions of Africa as “traditional” and suggest that Tchicaya’s play uses this transnationality to both critique and resist policies such as Mobutu’s. Furthermore, I claim that “authentic” power such as Mobutu’s is primarily a transnational performance and that Tchicaya’s resistance—embodied in the play by Lheki—is equally transnational and performative.

Impolite Interventions? English Satirical Prints in the Presence of the Academy, c. 1750–1780

This article examines the reciprocity between satirical and academic modes of image making, and locates that relationship within the context of an emergent bourgeois public sphere. The cultural and commercial imperatives of that sphere enabled its inhabitants to engage with conflicting modes of cultural output, consuming grotesque and bawdy satire as an exercise in political autonomy, while simultaneously emulating 'elite' politeness. In particular, the commercial growth and increasing visibility of satirical prints challenged the polite hierarchy of art as it was understood by the nascent academies and societies of art established in the same period. This process of establishment needs to be re-framed in the context of satirical intervention, and will be examined via two paintings that provoked distinct satirical responses: Benjamin West's The Death of Wolfe and Francis Hayman's The See-Saw. Correspondingly, satirical print culture itself can be reframed in light of its use (and parody) of academic visual tropes and techniques.

Lessons from America? News and Politics in Hard Times

On 30 October 2010, US news satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert jointly held the ‘Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear’, attracting a crowd of over 200,000 in Washington, DC, and an estimated national audience of two million viewers on Comedy Central. While Stewart denied it, this event was widely interpreted as a satirical response to Fox News Anchor Glenn Beck's earlier ‘Restoring Honor’ rally, a controversial event that hosted numerous figures of the conservative and Christian right, including Sarah Palin. This event provides a case study in this article for a wider reflection on contemporary debates surrounding contemporary journalism, drawing on work that has situated ‘new political television’ in relation to wider transformations in mediated democracy, as this has been impacted by political-economic, technological, political and socio-cultural change.

La Precieuse, ou Le Mystere de la ruelle

Myriam Dufour-Maître's previous work on préciosité makes her the ideal scholar to edit and champion the cause of Michel de Pure's long novel La Précieuse (first published in 1656), and she certainly does not hold back from arguing that it ‘mérite de figurer parmi les romans du xviie siècle les plus novateurs que nous ayons à découvrir’ (p. 7 ). It is unfortunate, therefore, that an edition costing €130 is hardly going to reach the widest of readerships. Yet, for all the novel's obscurity and occasional longueurs, Dufour-Maître's proselytizing zeal is infectious and the quality of her analysis is high. Rather than becoming bogged down in attempts to decipher all the names of the précieuses (an often futile task that has preoccupied previous scholars), she concentrates on the many fascinating structural, narrative, linguistic, theoretical, intertextual, and gender-related elements of the book. Generous in acknowledging her debt to an unpublished doctoral thesis by Daniel Maher, Dufour-Maître is especially effective in commenting on the metatextual features of Part IV of the book, which she reads as a parodic and satirical response to Madeleine de Scudéry's Clélie (which was itself about to be published when Les Précieuses first appeared). As befits the role played by conversation in galanterie, La Précieuse is described by Dufour-Maître as ‘un roman critique de la conversation et de sa fonction matricielle dans l'invention galante’ (p. 65). Throughout the novel, various forms of orality are staged, whether through speeches, the interpretation of songs, or even the reading aloud of letters or stories. Yet the text is equally concerned with the process of reading: ‘bien disantes ou insupportables bavardes, fines lectrices ou tyrans des Lettres, les précieuses de Michel de Pure sont encore d'habiles rédactrices ou des plumitives sans succès’ (p. 66). Moreover, various linguistic debates of the time are brought to the fore in the novel. Perhaps most interestingly, the frequency with which the words ‘liberté’, ‘libre’, and ‘librement’ appear — a point that Somaize remarked upon in his Dictionnaire des Pretieuses (1660) — shows the extent to which freedom of expression, choice, creativity even, are central preoccupations for the women who populate the text. Dufour-Maître includes useful accompanying material as appendices, which helps to elucidate de Pure's and others' conception of préciosité and galanterie. The Index is divided between ‘Notions’ and ‘Personnages’, and in the text itself her notes are learned but never intrusive.

Van Seters’ Saga of King David

AbstractThe Saga of King David by John Van Seters is an engrossing yet scholarly book, written with an originality that has challenged the field of bible for more than forty years. Expanding and revising a series of articles and the less detailed analysis of his sweeping opus In Search of History, Van Seters puts the final nails in the coffin of the Solomonic dating of the books of Samuel and the Succession Narrative. He offers his own original hypothesis, namely that the Succession Narrative was composed in the late Persian period as a satirical response to the Deuteronomistic Historian’s account of David’s reign. He submits that the Sitz im Leben of the account is the mercenary dominated martial culture of the late fifth and early fourth century Near East. As is typical to much of Van Seters’ work, he mostly disregards language as a means of dating the Court History. In the absence of linguistic criteria in the bulk of the material under discussion which would indicate a Persian date of composition, many scholars will look in askance at Van Seters’ very late dating of I and II Samuel. This problem and others identified in this review should, however, should not deter scholarship from deeply engaging with Van Seters’ ideas.

Bombing (on) the Border: Ali and Ali and the aXes of Evil as Transnational Agitprop

A radically satirical response to the American invasion of Iraq post-9/11, The Adventures of Ali and Ali and the aXes of Evil combines traditional agitprop with the transnational impulses of postcolonial performance to imagine some kind of new world emerging from exile, diaspora, and the ashes of the old. Dramatizing the plight of stateless refugees from a fictional Middle Eastern country, its three Canadian playwrights deploy Canadian theatre's historically ambivalent position along the margins of American cultural and military power to attack American foreign policy as well as to critique Canadian complicity and hypocrisy. This essay examines the ideological origins of the play and the metatheatrical comic strategies that allow it to transcend what Noam Chomsky calls “the bounds of the expressible” and to speak the politically unspeakable.

"Apple Pie with Oreo Crust": Fran Ross's Recipe for an Idiosyncratic American Novel

An elderly Jew, riding in the subway, saw a Negro reading the Jewish Daily Forward. The Jew watched, spellbound, as the Negro read sedately on. Finally, unable to contain himself, the old man asked, Excuse me, mister. I don't want to be rode--but I have to ask it: Are you Jewish? The Negro lowered the paper in disgust: That's all I need noch! A Jewish matron dialed a number and asked, Hello, Mrs. Weiss? No, ma'am, came a melodious voice. is the shvartzeh. (1) Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish (265, 377) In Fran Ross's 1974 novel Oreo, the Greek legend of Theseus' journey into the Labyrinth becomes a feminist tall tale of a young black woman's passage from Philadelphia to New York in search of her Jewish father. (2) This satirical novel explores the heterogeneity rather than the homogeneity of African Americans. As slang for a black American who is perceived to be culturally inauthentic, oreo and similar terms like cookie, Afro-Saxon, and the more recent and incog-Negro belong to a popular discourse regarding the divergence of racial identity and genetic heritage from cultural behavior, class identification, and political attitudes, a divergence that results from the genetic and cultural hybridity, class mobility, and political diversity of African Americans. If a black person says, `John is very black,' he is referring to John's politics, not his skin color (Ross, Oreo 5). Ross's Oreo is not a culturally whitewashed, deracinated, or wannabe white character who has assimilated European American cultural styles in order to escape the supposed inferiority of African American culture or to be more acceptable to the mainstream. Rather, she offers an intimate view of two of the diverse minorities that create American culture. With Oreo's adventures, Ross depicts a complex negotiation of identity within a racial, ethnic, sociocultural, and linguistic heterogeneity that extends beyond the black and of America's favorite cookie. A satire on relations between African Americans and Jews, as well as a topsy-turvy treatment of racial and ethnic shibboleths and stereotypes in American popular culture, Oreo is a formally inventive picaresque novel written as a series of language games, quips, quizzes, comic translations, and bilingual wisecracks. Initially published in an edition of five thousand, Oreo was a rare find for collectors and scholars rummaging in used bookstores before its recent reprinting by Northeastern University Press. Although remarkable for its satirical response to the racial and sexual politics of the 1970s, it failed to find a larger audience, possibly because, in the process of commingling two ghettoized vernaculars, African American and Yiddish, the novel also draws on material that both black and Jewish readers might find offensive or perplexing. Ross's double-edged satire includes: a Jewish immigrant who retains a voodoo consultant named Dr. Macumba; a reverse-discrimination tale of an all-black suburb where a local ordinance is selectively enforced to keep people from moving into the neighborhood; a black radio producer's script of an advertisement for Passover TV dinners; a joke about the heroine's odds of inheriting sickle-cell anemia and Tay-Sachs disease; and a fight in which Oreo beats a predatory pimp to a pulp while wearing only a pair of sandals, a brassiere, and a mezuzah. (3) What makes this quirky novel accessible is its appropriation of popular culture genres, including jokes, riddles, cartoons, graffiti, advertising, palmistry, cookbooks, and dream Ross borrows as freely from such popular sources as she does from the culture of high literacy represented by classical literature and great books. Just as Oreo's journey alludes to the Theseus legend, her catalogue of popular culture, especially her inventory of jokes, alludes to conventional codes of cliches and stereotypes. …