Drawing Dissent: Postracialist Pedagogy, Racist Literacy, and Racial Plagiarism in Anti-Obama Political Cartoons

Howard, Philip S. S.

doi:10.1080/10714413.2014.958379

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Billig, 2001; Weaver, 2010a, 2011). Further, as many have argued, ambiguity and double-entendre are central features of the racist humour we encounter in contemporary postracialist times (Goldberg, 2012; Howard, 2014; Pérez, 2013; Weaver, 2010b). In societies that claim to be racially egalitarian, those who engage in racist humour must navigate a tenuous line between overt racism and what might pass as harmless racial jesting (Pérez, 2013).…”

Section: Part 1: Theoretical Framingsmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…In anti-black humour, there is an intense focus on corporeality to an extent that appears to exceed that in racist humour targeting non-Black groups (Howard, 2014; Pérez, 2016: 45; Weaver, 2010a, 2011; Modood as cited in Weaver, 2013: 126). To describe it, Weaver has proposed the concept of embodied racism, which he defines as:a racism that focuses on parts of the body, on phenotype or on corporeality.…”

Section: Part 1: Theoretical Framingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These trends continue in the contemporary moment. I vividly remember my undergraduate roommate asking, in what he thought was a witty joke, whether I could use a fork to comb my hair should I ever lose my Afro-pik, and race-in-biology has been central to anti-Obama humour in the United States portraying him and his family as apes (see Howard, 2014). I suggest here, then, that race-in-biology’s tropes, fueled by a libidinal economy rooted in slavery, are what continue unabated as the embodied racism in racist humour today.…”

Section: Part 1: Theoretical Framingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Both race and humour theorists have argued that racist humour is a means for mobilizing racist ideas where explicit racist discourse is nominally frowned upon (Goldberg, 2012; Howard, 2014; Pérez, 2013, 2016). In a postracialist climate where race is not supposed to be a factor, blackface in general, but the Jamaicanization of it in particular, allow the perpetuation of the racist ideas that constitute dominant conceptions of Canadianness.…”

Section: Partmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A laugh for the national project: Contemporary Canadian blackface humour and its constitution through Canadian anti-blackness

Howard

2018

Ethnicities

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This article investigates the ways that the ostensible humour associated with contemporary blackface incidents in Canada is constituted. It argues that the conditions of possibility for contemporary Canadian blackface humour are an anti-black libidinal economy dependent upon the tropes of biological racism, and a socially embedded, psychic association of the Black body with pleasure that was entrenched through slavery’s relations of domination. With the specificities of anti-blackness in view, this article refines Simon Weaver’s concept, embodied racism, to emphasize that it is a form of biological racism that has historically targeted Black people, and continues to do so today. Then, building upon these foundations, I argue that contemporary Canadian blackface humour is constituted and intensified by the specific racialized social relations in Canada, such as its postracialist claim to being racially egalitarian, and the ways it mobilizes multiculturalist discourse to make Blackness perpetually foreign and out-of-place in Canada—matters that, in part, characterize the contemporary Canadian colonial project. The article therefore suggests that making clear these ways in which contemporary Canadian blackface is only legible as humour through racialized social relations is a necessary component of challenging suggestions that blackface is harmless, non-racial humour.

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