Joking at the Limits of Protest in Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go

IF 0.9 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY

Studies in American Humor Pub Date : 2022-09-01 DOI:10.5325/studamerhumor.8.2.0337

Diego A. Millan

引用次数: 0

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This article takes up the centrality of jokes in Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go and analyzes them in ways that push on the limits of social protest fiction, a genre understood as anything but comedic. Tracing a relationship between interiority, what I call “the frictions of social laughter,” and deferment in Himes’s novel shows how pockets of life are made possible within inhospitable environments produced by racist power structures. Ultimately, by exploring the challenges of laughing together, this article shows that the role that laughter and joking plays in the novel’s expanded vision for Black life is larger than previously understood, going beyond the merely instrumental.

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在切斯特·海姆斯的《如果他叫，那就让他走》中调侃抗议的极限

摘要:本文以切斯特·海姆斯的小说《如果他叫了就让他走》中的笑话为中心，对其进行分析，以突破社会抗议小说的极限。在希姆斯的小说中，我追踪了内在性(我称之为“社会笑声的摩擦”)和延迟之间的关系，表明了在种族主义权力结构产生的不适宜居住的环境中，生活是如何成为可能的。最后，通过探索一起笑的挑战，这篇文章表明，笑声和开玩笑在小说对黑人生活的扩展视野中所扮演的角色比以前所理解的要大，不仅仅是工具。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Studies in American Humor HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY-

CiteScore

1.40

自引率

90.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Welcome to the home of Studies in American Humor, the journal of the American Humor Studies Association. Founded by the American Humor Studies Association in 1974 and published continuously since 1982, StAH specializes in humanistic research on humor in America (loosely defined) because the universal human capacity for humor is always expressed within the specific contexts of time, place, and audience that research methods in the humanities strive to address. Such methods now extend well beyond the literary and film analyses that once formed the core of American humor scholarship to a wide range of critical, biographical, historical, theoretical, archival, ethnographic, and digital studies of humor in performance and public life as well as in print and other media. StAH’s expanded editorial board of specialists marks that growth. On behalf of the editorial board, I invite scholars across the humanities to submit their best work on topics in American humor and join us in advancing knowledge in the field.