Fannie and Alan Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College

Kobena Mercer - Carnivalesque and Grotesque: What Bakhtin's Laughter Tells Us About Art and Culture

Modernity devalued laughter as 'other' to the seriousness of high culture: how, then, might we understand the fears and fantasies of subaltern subjects who struggled throughout modern art and culture to be 'taken seriously'? Looking at works by Betye Saar, David Hammons, Adrian Piper and others, this talk explores the ambivalence that makes laughter such a compelling and volatile matter in cross-cultural encounters.

Kobena Mercer writes and teaches on the visual arts of the black diaspora and is an inaugural recipient of the 2006 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing. He was Reader in Art History and Diaspora Studies at Middlesex University, London, and has taught at New York University and University of California at Santa Cruz, and has received fellowships from Cornell University and the New School University in New York.

His first book, Welcome to the Jungle (1994) opened new lines of enquiry in art, film, and photography and his writings feature in several landmark anthologies, including Out There (1990), Cultural Studies (1992), Art and Its Histories (1998) and Theorizing Diaspora (2003). His monographs include James VanDer Zee, Adrian Piper, Issac Julien, Keith Piper and Rotimi Fani-Kayode.

He is series editor of Annotating Art's Histories, co-published by MIT and inIVA, whose titles include Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005), Discrepant Abstraction (2006), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (2007) and Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers (forthcoming 2008).