Black-faced, red faces: the potentials of humour for anti-racist action
| Autor: | Maria Hynes, Scott Sharpe |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2015 |
| Předmět: |
Cultural Studies
Sociology and Political Science Anti-racism media_common.quotation_subject Writ 05 social sciences 0507 social and economic geography Offensive Blackface Racism 0506 political science Variety (cybernetics) Action (philosophy) Aesthetics Anthropology Perception 050602 political science & public administration Sociology 10. No inequality 050703 geography Social psychology media_common |
| Zdroj: | Ethnic and Racial Studies. 39:87-104 |
| ISSN: | 1466-4356 0141-9870 |
| DOI: | 10.1080/01419870.2016.1096405 |
| Popis: | Among incidences of everyday racism, offensive jokes are writ large as a way of establishing and maintaining social norms and policing the boundaries of the social body. Yet humour's possible deployment toward anti-racist ends constitutes an under-researched problem. This paper examines an incident of supposedly humorous blackface performance on an Australian family variety television show. The incident was notable as an occasion where humour was used with racist effects but also to anti-racist ends. Literature on anti-racist action commonly assumes that responses to racism should have the gravity commensurate to the problem. We argue that humour enables actors to take a ‘decommitted’ relationship to their actions, creating the perception of distance between themselves and the action. While this capacity to decommit enables racist actions to masquerade as ‘just a joke’, it may also form the basis of a less confrontational, but potentially powerful, form of anti-racist action. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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