"Didn't our people laugh?": Pacific Humor as Resistance
Todd Thompson
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Todd Nathan Thompson is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he also serves as Assistant Chair of the English Department. He is author of The National Joker: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015). Thompson’s work on political satire and pre-1900 American literature has also appeared in Scholarly Editing, Early American Literature, ESQ, Nineteenth-Century Prose, Journal of American Culture, Studies in American Humor, Teaching American Literature, the Blackwell Companion to Poetic Genre, and elsewhere. In summer 2017 he was a Peterson Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society.
Abstract
I am at work on a monograph, titled Savage Laughter: Nineteenth-Century American Humor and the South Seas, that characterizes humor and satire as a risible contact zone between the US and Polynesia and demonstrates how the... [ view full abstract ]
I am at work on a monograph, titled Savage Laughter: Nineteenth-Century American Humor and the South Seas, that characterizes humor and satire as a risible contact zone between the US and Polynesia and demonstrates how the comic functioned both in the service of and in resistance to the US’s pre-1900 imperial ambitions. Through archival research at the American Antiquarian Society and in Honolulu, I have uncovered—in almanacs, joke books, pamphlets, and periodicals—a plethora of Anglo humor about Hawaiians and other Polynesians. Yankee humor, Crockett almanacs, and cannibal-and-boiled-missionary jokes, for instance, all express, and attempt to laugh away, anxieties about Polynesian otherness or use imagine the Pacific as an arena in which larger-than-life American figures assert nationalist feats of strength.
But I also seek to detail the subversive power of Pacific Islanders’ comic resistance to imperialism. How, for instance, did Pacific islanders wield practices such as riddling and folklore as cultural weapons against Western interlopers? In my position paper, I will limn and weigh the usefulness of several models of theorizing and analyzing Polynesian anti-imperial humor and laughter, including James Caron’s treatment of hula in Mark Twain: Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter, Nicholas Thomas’s oppositional re-reading of John Hawkesworth’s account of an “odd scene” of sexual display in Tahiti in 1769, Yunte Huang’s “counterpoetics,” and others. In the “Pacific Intersections” seminar I hope to receive feedback on additional methodologies/approaches to push my thinking on pre-1900 Pacific humor in more nuanced directions.
Authors
-
Todd Thompson
(Indiana University of Pennsylvania)
Topic Area
Pacific Intersections
Session
S9 » Seminar 9: Pacific Intersections (15:45 - Saturday, 24th March, Boardroom East)
Presentation Files
The presenter has not uploaded any presentation files.
