Critical Humor: Theorizing the Politics of
Satire
Session Organizer: Lindsey Simms
Dept. of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
simms001@umn.edu
Paper # 1:
“Militant Irony on
the Periphery of Capitalism: The Politics of Satire in José Rizal’s El
filibusterismo”
This paper will argue that Filipino writer José Rizal’s scathing novel El filibusterismo (1891) marks an important waypoint in the history of modern satire—a point somewhere between the enlightened but Eurocentric satires typified by Swift and Voltaire, and the decidedly anti-colonial message of satirical novels emerging from Africa and Latin America in the later half of the twentieth century. El filibusterismo, translated into an English edition titled Subversion, tells the story of a bold if somewhat mad plot to obliterate the colonial bureaucracy of Manila with a time bomb concealed in a giant jeweled pomegranate. The architect of this plot disguises himself as a foreign capitalist and plays off of the greed and vanity of the colonial ruling classes in order to lure them to an opulent dinner party on top of a hidden pile of dynamite. In the build up to the explosion, the novel manages to satirize corrupt colonial officials, lecherous missionaries, self-interested native intellectuals and the superstitious peasantry. Since Spain is itself on the outskirts of Europe in the nineteenth century, Rizal is able to outflank the colonizers and attack the moral hypocrisy of their colonial project as well as the backwardness of Spain in relation to the supposedly more advanced centers of Europe and the United States. With an eye to this unique history, my paper will explore the innovative ways Rizal’s novel uses satire or “militant irony” to challenge the European metropolis from the periphery of the global capitalist domain it had established.
Andy Opitz
Dept. of Cultural Studies and
Comparative Literature
University of Minnesota, Twin
Cities
opit0010@umn.edu
Paper #2:
“Satire and
Nonsynchronism in African Literature”
Describing his seminal novel Devil on the Cross, Ngugi wa Thiong’o claims that satire, when used to expose neo-colonial realities, is one of the most effective weapons that a writer can borrow from oral tradition. In a similar gesture, the Brazilian literary critic Roberto Schwarz writes that parody is often the most combative of literary forms. What these writers share is the belief that satire or parody has the ability to expose the contradictions of a retrograde ruling class that is out of synch with the progressive desires of the general population. This paper explores the ways in which satire in postcolonial African literature can be used to reveal the nonsynchronous contradictions of the post-independence national bourgeoisie that failed to bring down the structures of colonial hegemony. Authors such as Ngugi, Ousmane Sembene, Wole Soyinka, and Ken Saro-Wiwa use satire to discuss the ways that hopes for change were dashed by the governments that took power when the colonialists left. Furthermore, I argue that in these literary works, satire becomes an important critical tool for sifting through various types of structural disjunctions within modernity. In other words, satire not only works to expose the paradoxical socio-political forms of postcolonial Africa, but it also articulates a form of nonsynchronism that allows for an African modernity that is non-identical to the Western modernity embraced by the post-independence governments.
Lindsey Simms
Dept. of Cultural Studies and
Comparative Literature
University of Minnesota, Twin
Cities
simms001@umn.edu
Paper # 3:
“South Park: post-modern, post-ideology,
post-satire?”
Television has been characterized
as an ideology machine: a well-honed apparatus for transmitting and inculcating
the values of an elite group to a wide heterogeneous audience. In this paper I will argue that television satire
complicates this straightforward relationship between technology, programming
content and audience in a way that undermines the potential influence of ideology.
South Park, a parodic social satire with
cross-generational appeal is particularly salient to this issue. The program presumes its viewers are aware of
stereotypes, social issues, and current events amidst a struggle for power
and meaning in what is rapidly becoming a relativized
social milieu. The past twenty years
of micropolitics gave birth to a theorization of a horizontal
network of power relations. This horizontal
network, in which everyone is oppressed but no one oppresses, has taken on
the substance of common sense. In his
essay, “Postmodernism or the Logic of Late Capitalism” Frederic Jameson claims
that in advanced capitalist societies, “parody finds itself without a vocation.”
I propose that South Park has found parody’s vocation in late capitalism.
In this situation, parody and satire have endless referents and no longer
need to disrupt the master’s language because the accomplishments of micropolitics
and political-correctness have made language radically contingent.
South Park takes advantage of the discursive heterogeneity of late
capitalism
through the peculiarly American version of egalitarianism: treat everyone the same. Following this logic, and with a seemingly unlimited arsenal of jokes and targets, South Park sets out to make fun of everyone.
Stephen Groening
Dept. of Cultural Studies and
Comparative Literature
University of Minnesota, Twin
Cities