Humor in French Postcolonial Literature and Culture: A Paradox?

Abstract

From black face, sexist jokes, anti-Semitic caricatures to anti-Muslim cartoons, comedic discourses have targeted minority groups. The aim of my dissertation, however, is to demonstrate the ways in which minorities who have been targets of jokes, have in turn themselves become its creators, using humor as a medium to deal with complicated questions of identity. In this overview of my dissertation, I outline how a selection of Francophone Maghrebi, Caribbean and sub-Saharan African writers, graphic novelists and stand-up comedians repurpose colonial stereotypes. Of interest is not humor writ large, but comedic play whose hallmark is a sense of ambivalence—it deals with issues of gravity with a sense of levity; and it simultaneously coopts yet subverts colonial representations of alterity. I argue that such comedic play with official discourses allows these humorists not only to delegitimize simplistic Metropolitan representations of alterity, but also to furnish ludic alternatives in their place. By using humor in their creation, postcolonial humorists laugh at misery and play with images of cultural alterity without necessarily propagating them, instead reappropriating them in ways that more accurately reflect the contemporary diversity and heterogeneity of modern France.

Keywords:

• Postcolonial humor
• tragedy
• stereotypes
• ambivalence
• complicity
• reappropriation

Notes

1 Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves argue in The Naked Jape: Uncovering the Hidden World of Jokes (2007) that “without foreigners and foreignness, there would be far fewer jokes” (quoted in Ervine 3).

2 A further complication is added in literary manifestations of humor. Often considered pioneering philosophical treatises on laughter, Henri Bergson’s Le Rire (1900) and Sigmund Freud’s The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1905), posited humor as an essentially social phenomenon. This theory, however, falls short when it comes to humor in literature, since reading is a profoundly individual and isolated activity. Moura argues that in the absence of this spontaneity occasioned by social laughter, literary humor provokes a more subtle emotion, one that is more aptly termed a “sourire” rather than a “rire” (39).

3 Particularly thorny are discussions of identity given France’s official “blindness” to social categories based on racial, ethnic and religious difference. As Jonathan Ervine argues, such discussions are “seen as un-French” and “incompatible with [French] Republican ideals of universality and the single and indivisible nation” (2).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sonali Ravi

Sonali Ravi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of French and Italian at Princeton University. A former student of Sciences Po and École Normale Supérieure, she has trained in both the American and French education systems. She received her MA in French and Francophone Studies at Princeton University and her BA in French and Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College. Her research explores contemporary French and Francophone postcolonial literature, film, and stand-up comedy through the lens of humor and performance. At Princeton, Sonali has developed and taught French language and literature courses at both the introductory and advanced levels. Her publications investigate visual and textual subversions of Orientalist thought in graphic novels and the articulation of identity in women’s writing through comedic discourse.

André Benhaïm

André Benhaïm is Professor of French and francophone literature in the department of French and Italian. Particularly interested in questions of identity and representation, the rapport between ethics and aesthetics, he also focuses on the relationship between “canonical” literature and “popular culture.” He is the author of Panim. Visages de Proust (2006), the editor of The Strange M. Proust (2009), and the co-editor of Albert Camus au Quotidien (with Aymeric Glacet, 2013) as well as Zoopoétique. Les Animaux dans la literature française (20e-21e siècle) (with Anne Simon, 2017). His most recent publications include 1913: The Year of French Modernism (co-edited with Effie Rentzou, Manchester UP, 2020) and Après Ulysse. Vers une poétique de l’hospitalité en Méditerranée (Hermann, 2021).