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eBook details

• Title: Race and Black Humor: From a Planetary Perspective (Essay)
• Author : Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
• Release Date : January 22, 2010
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 90 KB

Description

1. A Racist Joke Storming Katrina Black humor is a literary concept that is undoubtedly very useful for rethinking the fantastic in the arts. However, before reexamining this concept seriously in the context of multi-ethnic literary history, let me start by identifying our own allegedly post-colonialist and globalist reality as full of black humor. Let me illustrate the point with an episode that came in the wake of the apocalyptic disaster that stormed the Deep South half a decade ago. When Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans on August 29, 2005, Scott Stevens, a thirty-nine-year-old Idaho weatherman and nine-year veteran at KPVI-TV News Channel 6, blamed the Japanese Mafia for the hurricane. Since Katrina, Stevens has been in newspapers across the country where he has been quoted as saying the Yakuza Mafia used a Russian-made Cold War device--an "electromagnetic generator"--to cause Katrina, in a bid to avenge the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima ("Weatherman"). This kind of ridiculously funny idea reminds us of those outrageous or preposterous books, what are called "Tondemo-bon" in Japanese, that are obsessed with conspiracy theories, pseudo-science, or historical revisionism. These are books detailing, for example, the theory that the Japanese and the Jews have a common ancestry, or the theory that locates the ethnic origins of the Native Americans in the Japanese, or the theory of what one book calls "A Final Warning from Mother Earth, a guide to the future based on the knowledge of the ancients of Atlantis and other civilizations." One might compare this with Thomas Pynchon's latest novel Inherent Vice (2009) which is full of outrageously paranoiac ideas such as the notion that President Richard Nixon is "a descendant of Atlantis" and Ho Chi Minh is "of Lemuria" (109). However, it is also true that these outrageous and preposterous books are all "amusing from a perspective that differs from what the author intends" ("Tondemo-bon"). And as the works of Jack Womack demonstrate, without this outrageous and preposterous imagination, science fiction and fantasy could not have thrived.

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