The serious work of humor in postcolonial literature Adele Marian Holoch , University of Iowa Follow

[摘要] This dissertation examines the role of humor in contemporary South Asian and African postcolonial literature, arguing that humor opens new spaces for historically marginalized individuals to be heard. I argue that in addition to its unique capacities to question and rebel against colonial authority, humor helps those who deploy it to resist victimhood and enact a psychological rebellion against the circumstances of colonialism and its legacies, and facilitates a sense of community through laughter among both those who deploy it and those who enjoy it as audience members. I establish a theoretical framework based in the work of Aristotle, Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud and Mikhail Bakhtin, then analyze four modes of humor-- satire, irony, black humor, and the grotesque--as they are incorporated in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong"o"s Wizard of the Crow (Kenya, 2007); Arundhati Roy"s The God of Small Things (India, 1997); Bapsi Sidhwa"s Cracking India (Pakistan; first published in 1988 as Ice-Candy Man); Manjula Padmanabhan"s play Harvest (India, 1997); Aravind Adiga"s The White Tiger (India, 2008); Indra Sinha"s Animal"s People (India, 2008) and Ousmane Sembène"s Xala (Senegal, 1973). By reading these literary narratives within a unifying framework of "humor," even as I pay close attention to the differences between them--differences such as their geographical locations, the political situations they engage, the specific cultural codes with which they play, and their unique incorporations of particular humorous modes--I contend that humor ultimately performs very significant work in postcolonial literature, opening many destabilizing and subversive possibilities that more ostensibly serious forms of writing do not share.