Cheeky fictions : : laughter and the postcolonial / / edited by Susanne Reichl and Mark Stein.

• Superior document: Internationale Forschungen zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 91
• Year of Publication: 2005
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Internationale Forschungen zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ; 91.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (324 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

Humour is a key feature, laughter a central element, disrespect a vital textual strategy of postcolonial transcultural practice. Devices such as irony, parody, and subversion, can be subsumed under an interventionist stance and have accordingly received some critical attention. But literary and cultural postcolonial criticism has been marked by a restraint verging on the pious towards the wider significance and functions of laughter. This collection transcends such orthodoxies: laughter can constitute an intervention - but it can also function otherwise. The essays collected here take an interest in the strategic use of what can loosely be termed laughter - in all its manifestations. Examining postcolonial transcultural practice from a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, this study seeks to analyse laughter and the postcolonial in their complexity. For the first time, then, this collection gathers a group of international specialists in postcolonial transcultural studies to analyse the functions of laughter, the comic and humour in a wide range of cultural texts. Contributors work on texts from Africa, Asia, Australia, North America, the Caribbean, and Britain, reading work by authors such as Zakes Mda, Timothy Mo, VS Naipaul, and Zadie Smith. This interdisciplinary collection is a contribution to both, postcolonial studies and humour theory.

Table of Contents

Susanne REICHL/Mark STEIN: Introduction -- I. Laughter's double vision - Humour and cultural ambiguity -- Ulrike ERICHSEN: Smiling in the face of adversity: How to use humour to defuse cultural conflict -- Anthony ILONA: 'Laughing through the tears': Mockery and self-representation in V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas and Earl Lovelace's The Dragon Can't Dance -- Virginia RICHTER: Laughter and aggression: Desire and derision in a postcolonial context -- Helga RAMSEY-KURZ: Humouring the terrorists or the terrorised? Militant Muslims in Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Hanif Kureishi -- II. Traditions and transgressions - Writing back and forth -- Heinz ANTOR: Postcolonial laughter in Canada: Mordecai Richler's The Incomparable Atuk -- Susan LEVER: The colonizer's gift of cursing: Satire in David Foster's Moonlite -- Michael MEYER: Swift and Sterne revisited: Postcolonial parodies in Rushdie and Singh-Toor -- Detlef GOHRBANDT: After-laughter, or the comedy of decline: Ronald Searle's critique of postwar Englishness in The Rake's Progress -- III. Ethnic cabaret - A license to laugh? -- Mita BANERJEE: Queer laughter: Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy and the normative as comic -- Astrid FELLNER/Klaus HEISSENBERGER: 'I was born in East L.A.': Humour and the displacement of nationality and ethnicity -- Christiane SCHLOTE: 'The sketch's the thing wherein we'll catch the conscience of the audience': Strategies and pitfalls of ethnic TV comedies in Britain, the United States, and Germany -- IV. The language of humour - The humour of language -- Margit OZVALDA: Worlds apart: Schools in postcolonial Indian fiction -- Susanne PICHLER: Interculturality and humour in Timothy Mo's Sour Sweet -- Susanne MÜHLEISEN: What makes an accent funny, and why? Black British Englishes and humour televised -- V. Laughing it off - Does therapeutic humour work? -- Maggie Ann BOWERS: 'Ethnic glue': Humour in Native American literatures -- Annie GAGIANO: Using a comic vision to contend with tragedy: Three unusual African English novels -- Gisela FEURLE: Madam & Eve - Ten Wonderful Years: A cartoon strip and its role in post-apartheid South Africa -- Wendy WOODWARD: Laughing back at the kingfisher: Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness and postcolonial humour -- Index -- Contributors.