Fannie and Alan Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College

Michael Chaney: Currently, I am working towards a theory of post-multicultural humor in print and digital comic art by black-identified artists and writers. I approach the emergence of an "African American aesthetic" in an ever-growing field of comic art historically. By teasing out the implications of black abolitionist appropriations of dominant satirical works, such as comic illustrations from Punch, I hope to acquire conceptual leverage for understanding the current and vexing interrelation of race and visual culture--with its exciting, if subtly familiar, debates concerning race and commodification, assimilation and resistance, mimicry and mockery, humor and the human.

Project summary: My research focuses on race in American literary and popular culture, located especially at intersections of verbal and visual representation. My book Fugitive Vision challenges the longstanding argument that antebellum slaves could only attain subject status through print or by re-negotiating the terms of their commodification. Far from posing the visual as an alternative means to cultural authority, I argue that the interface of the visual and the literary encodes race and gender embodiment in ways unavailable to print or illustration alone. Aside from nineteenth-century literature, I also explore these issues in contemporary graphic novels, cartoons, and genre fiction.

Veronika Fuechtner, Assistant Professor of German at Dartmouth College, studied German literature, media, history and political science at the Philipps-University in Marburg and the Free University in Berlin. She received her M.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She has published articles on Herbert Marcuse, Alfred Döblin, and on the state of German Studies in the US. She is presently completing a book on the relation between psychoanalysis and culture in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, for which she has received grants from the NEH and the ACLS.

Project summary: How funny is Borat in Berlin? Germany's Racial Unconscious
Current political and cultural discussions in Germany still are largely based on the vision of a racially and culturally homogenous nation. The recent critical attention to authors and artists who provocatively assume mixed-heritage identities and/or question general assumptions about a national German cultural canon, has led to a rethinking of the field in terms of a transnational German Studies with new critical terminology such as Leslie Adelson's courtyard ethnoscape or Katrin Sieg's ethnic drag. This Humanities Center project is envisioned as part of a larger project that discusses cultural representations resisting the narrative of homogeneity and analyzes how this narrative could be sustained despite many historical and cultural challenges. I seek to explore visual representations of race in recent comedy performances and films, such as Serdar Somuncu's public readings of Mein Kampf, the comedy duo Erkan & Stefan or the film Kebab Connection.

Allen Hockley graduated from the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto in 1995 and has been teaching in the Department of Art History at Dartmouth college ever since. Japanese print culture, 1600 to the present, constitutes his primary field of research. He has authored several articles, exhibition catalogues and a monograph on various aspects of the Japanese print tradition. Dr. Hockley also researches and writes on the subject of early Japanese photography. Among other projects, he is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled The Visual Culture of Globetrotters' Japan.

Project summary: The Other Within
Japan had a long history of visual humor prior to its rapid westernization in the late nineteenth century but the racial homogeneity of Japan precluded a focus on differences in class, gender, and age. The introduction of racialized humor by foreign artists working in Japan in the late 1800s expanded this focus considerably. Japanese illustrators attempted to counter Western caricatures of Japanese with their own satirical take on foreigners. The racially inspired caricature they developed was subsequently redeployed in two spheres. Modernized Japanese became an other within Japanese society that inspired self-reflective satire targeting the westernization of Japanese bodies. Japanese military aggression against Taiwan and Korea in the 1870s and its war with China in the 1890s created an other within the broader N.E. Asian community of nations and peoples, which artists created as imperialist propaganda.

Esiaba Irobi studied at the universities of Nigeria, Sheffield, Leeds and holds a B.A. in English/Drama, M.A. Comparative Literature, M.A. Film/Theatre, and a Ph.D. in Theatre Studies. He has taught at New York University (1997-2000) Towson University (2000-2002) and, presently, Ohio University, Athens, USA, where he is an Associate Professor of International Theatre/Cinema. (2002 -) His forthcoming books include: African Festival and Ritual Theatre: Resisting Globalization on the Continent and Diaspora since 1492 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and Before They Danced in Chains: Performance Theories of Africa and the African Diaspora (Harvard University Press, 2008).

Project summary: Race, Representation and the American Media: Subversive Humor in the Video Documentaries of Marlon T. Riggs
In this project I will illustrate how Marlon T. Riggs uses humor as an ambivalent and subversive device to deconstruct and explode racist and homophobic images of African Americans encoded in the American media in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. I will also analyze the cinematic and discursive techniques that Riggs uses to trope and signify on the putative images of African Americans as subhuman and never-do-wells in white media historically.

Alexandra Karentzos, PhD, is Junior Professor of Art History at the University of Trier in Germany; she was previously Assistant Curator at the Alte Nationalgalerie and the Nationalgalerie Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum of Contemporary Art (both in Berlin) and has taught History of Art at the University of Art Braunschweig. Her research interests cover the art of the nineteenth century to the present, focusing especially on gender and post-colonial issues (irony and postcolonialism, orientalism, gender studies and system theory, construction of body and gender, art and tourism). Co-founder and member of the board of the Center for Postcolonial and Gender Studies (CePoG) Trier.

Project summary: Humor as the Strategy of the "Arab Image Foundation" My research project will analyze humor as a postcolonial strategy, investigating how laughter in contemporary works of art aims not to humiliate ethnic groups but rather seeks to problematize precisely those stereotypes with which ethnic groups are usually segregated and vilified. It is irony that lends itself to such postcolonial art in its endeavor to challenge identity constructs. The distinguishing characteristic of irony for such works is its playful engagement with constructs of meaning and its reflective potential. The research project will examine these forms of humor and irony with respect to their political dimensions, giving particular attention to the specific visual features of artistic representation. The body of work for this undertaking will be selected from the photographs and films of the Arab Image Foundation. This corpus shall enable a focus on the ironical reinterpretation of the Middle East.

Félix de la Concha, La lectora de cómics (the comics reader), Boone, 2002

Ana Merino is a poet and an assistant professor of Spanish at Dartmouth College. She has published the academic book El Cómic Hispánico (Cátedra, 2003), a critical monograph on Chris Ware (Sinsentido, 2005), a catalogue on Fantagraphics (Gijon S/N, 2003), and five books of poetry: Preparativos para un viaje (1995), Los días gemelos (1997), La voz de los relojes (2000), Juegos de niños (2003) and Compañera de celda (2006). She has won the Adonais and Fray Luis de León awards for poetry, and the Diario de Avisos award for her short articles on comics for the literary magazine Leer. She is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Cartoon Studies, and has served as curator for three comics exhibitions. Her next book focuses on issues of childhood and marginality in Latin America.

Project summary: Numerous Latin American comic authors use humor to make fundamental reflections upon the concepts of race and nationality. My research focus on the works of Argentine Dante Quinterno (1909-2003) and his Amerindian character Patoruzu, a cacique from Tehuelche, Patagonia, created as a comic strip in 1928. Patoruzu was a very interesting example of the search for the stereotypical national identity and the concept of exotic otherness. Another contemporary Argentine artist is Oski (Oscar Conti, 1914-1979) who in his book Vera Historia de Indias creates a profoundly humorous satirical 'conversation' between the original documents of the conquest of America and his own graphic interpretation. On the one hand he deals with the conflict of the conquest, on the other he focuses on the construction of the Argentine national identity in education and everyday life. The idea of the "typical" Argentine gaucho and the humoristic dimensions of the "Argentine National Identity" can be also approached through Fontanarrosa's work (1944- ). In his dialogue with Oski we see representations of the gaucho and in his dialogue with Quinterno we see the representation of the Amerindian. My research compares those works with Mexican artists who also preoccupy themselves with the ideas of race, identity and nation in their work, as in the case of Abel Quezada (1920-1991), El Fisgón or Ríus (1934- ). They comment on Mexicanidad (what it means to be a Mexican) and the history of their country in relation to the global reality from the 20th century up to the present.

Tanya Sheehan will join the Dept. of Art History at Rutgers University in January 2008 as Assistant Professor of American Art. Previously Dr. Sheehan was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University and a graduate student at Brown University. She is currently completing a book based on her doctoral dissertation which examines the relationship between studio portrait photography and medical discourse in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. In addition to receiving funding for this project from the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and the Library Company of Philadelphia, Dr. Sheehan was awarded the Society for the History of Technology's annual dissertation prize in 2004. Her writing on African-American and commercial photography has recently been published in the Journal of American History and American Quarterly, respectively.

Project summary: Dr. Sheehan's second book project investigates popular ideas about American photography and racial identity in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In satirical photographs and treatises, illustrated magazines, trade cards, and even professional photographic literature, humorists relied upon photographic processes to both express and assuage widespread fears about the instability of racial categories in this period. While many observed that America's black population would all too readily embrace the racial reversals enabled by the photographic "negative," others used depictions of "negroes" and white women darkening their faces with photographic chemicals to illustrate anxieties concerning the cosmetic character of blackness. The goal of her project is to develop a model for taking photographic humor seriously, one which understands racial jokes as entertainment for white middle-class Americans and as highly complex social commentaries.

Sam Vásquez is an Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College. Her scholarship focuses on twentieth century African American, Caribbean, and other Black diasporic literatures. She is particularly interested in the role of humor in diasporic literature, specifically the ways in which authors engage Western canonical texts in exploring assertions of identity. Her research interests also include poetry and poetics, representations of art in literature, and critical race theory. A graduate of Colgate University, she received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University. Prior to joining the Dartmouth faculty, Vásquez held teaching positions at Boston University, Wheaton College and Rutgers University.

Rebecca Wanzo graduated with a PhD in English from Duke University in 2003. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Women's Studies and African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. Her book, The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling, is under contract with SUNY press. Her research interests include African American literature and culture, Critical Race Theory, Feminist Theory, U.S. popular print genres, and theories of affect.

Project Summary: How can representations of black bodies or black humor move beyond stereotype to progressive political commentary, when the history of black representation is one that is always already comical, hyperphysical, and outside of narratives about "universal" concerns in the United States? My project examines how recent creators of black comic book characters have reflexively created characters that challenge the alleged impossibility of black bodies as ideal representatives of the nation state, largely through satirizing the continued devaluation of black bodies in romances about citizenship in the U.S. From a comic novel satirizing the 2000 presidential election to a teenage, single-mother superhero, contemporary black comics place black citizens in heroic and nation building roles--and their presence is not a form of comic relief as it was in previous years. Subverting these histories, the comic book creators suggest that black bodies can be read differently, they are, I would suggest, teaching readers to read differently.

Mark Williams is an Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies. He received both of his graduate degrees from The School of Cinema-Television at The University of Southern California. His courses at Dartmouth include surveys of U.S. and international film history, television history and theory, and new media history and theory. He has published in a variety of journals and anthologies, including New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality; Collecting Visible Evidence; Television, History, and American Culture; and Living Color: Race, Feminism, and Television. His book Remote Possibilities, a history of early television in Los Angeles, will be published by Duke University Press. With Adrian Randolph, he is co-editing a University Press of New England book series on visual culture, entitled Interfaces. In conjunction with the Dartmouth College Library, he is initiating an e-journal to be called The Journal of E-Media Studies.

Project summary: Passing for History: Humor and Early Television Historiography
My project considers the dynamics of representation concerning several figures of visual humor in early television, in particular performers whose careers demonstrate historicized complexities between 1) the deployment of stereotypes for intentions of humor, and 2) practices of passing. Passing, like stereotypes themselves, can be understood to participate in a regime of visibility that affords both a regularized site for identification and a difficulty in assuming a stasis or fixity of identity. Humor can play a role in working to consolidate a presumed fixity, or to utterly undermine such a presumption. The resultant range and complexity of address introduces significant questions about not only televisual practices in any given era, but also the consideration of television historiography overall, and what passes for "history."