Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Humor in Native North American Literature and Culture: Survey
- 2 Reimagining Nativeness through Humor: Concepts and Terms
- 3 Expressing Humor in Contemporary Native Writing: Forms
- 4 Humor at Work in Contemporary Native Writing: Issues and Effects
- Conclusion
- Appendix: The State of Research on Humor in Native Writing
- Works Cited
- Index
Appendix: The State of Research on Humor in Native Writing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Humor in Native North American Literature and Culture: Survey
- 2 Reimagining Nativeness through Humor: Concepts and Terms
- 3 Expressing Humor in Contemporary Native Writing: Forms
- 4 Humor at Work in Contemporary Native Writing: Issues and Effects
- Conclusion
- Appendix: The State of Research on Humor in Native Writing
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
IN MOST LIBRARY CATALOGUES, a keyword search on “Native American humor” ironically turns up Walter Blair's Native American Humor (1937) — which does not concern itself with the humor of the indigenous population in the least, but rather contrasts US American with European humor. Native humor seems as absent from the academic mind as from the public consciousness in general, a deficit acknowledged on a regular basis by studies on ethnic humor (see Lowe 1986, 454; Theisz 1989, 12–13). Whereas there has been much attention paid to Black or Jewish humor, and at least some to the humor of hyphenated Americans (for example, Polish-Americans and Italian-Americans), interest in Native humor has mostly been restricted to anthropological and ethnographic studies of ritual humor. On the one hand, humor studies in general are an area rather neglected by literary criticism; on the other hand, those academic fields in which humor research is conducted tend to ignore literary production: “Much of the best recent work in humor research has been done by psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists, not by literary critics. Ironically, few of these social scientists appear to be familiar with ethnic literature; thus, the texts for their analyses are almost always jokes” (Lowe 1986, 449).
Dating from the beginning of the Native American Renaissance, “Indian Humor,” a chapter in Vine Deloria's Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), comprises the first comment that exceeds a narrowly anthropological focus and discusses contemporary Native humor at large — albeit not in literature but in everyday interaction and jokes.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Humor in Contemporary Native North American LiteratureReimagining Nativeness, pp. 229 - 234Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008