The Cuban Question and the Ignorant American: Empire's Tropes and Jokes in Yankee Notions

IF 0.9 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY

Studies in American Humor Pub Date : 2021-10-01 DOI:10.5325/studamerhumor.7.2.0304

Sarah J. Sillin

引用次数: 1

Abstract

ABSTRACT:By reading antebellum-era jokes about Cuba in conversation with Judith Yaross Lee's argument that imperialism has persistently shaped American humor, this essay considers how US humorists located pleasure in the nation's fraught foreign relations. Examining a variety of comics, anecdotes, and malapropisms from Yankee Notions demonstrates how this popular, long-running magazine mocked US Americans' efforts to assert their cosmopolitan knowledge of Cuba while nonetheless naturalizing US global power. Together, such jokes participated in a larger cultural project that shaped late nineteenth-century images of Cuba in a way that was designed to generate support for the idea of US intervention. More broadly, the magazine demonstrates how jokes about ignorance and knowingness became a way to justify US imperialism and resist foreign power.

查看原文本刊更多论文

古巴问题和无知的美国人:洋基观念中的帝国比喻和笑话

摘要:本文通过阅读美国内战前关于古巴的笑话，以及朱迪思·亚罗斯·李关于帝国主义一直影响着美国幽默的论述，来探讨美国幽默作家是如何在令人担忧的外交关系中找到乐趣的。通过对《洋基观念》中的各种漫画、轶事和误用的研究，我们可以看到这本长期流行的杂志是如何嘲笑美国人努力维护他们对古巴的世界性认识，同时又将美国的全球力量纳入其中的。这些笑话共同参与了一个更大的文化项目，塑造了19世纪晚期古巴的形象，旨在为美国干预的想法提供支持。更广泛地说，这本杂志展示了关于无知和知识的笑话如何成为为美帝国主义辩护和抵抗外国势力的一种方式。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

求助全文

约1分钟内获得全文求助全文

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.