The serious work of humor in postcolonial literature

TL;DRAbstract

This dissertation examines the role of humor in contemporary South Asian and African postcolonial literature, arguing that humor opens new spaces for historically marginalized individuals to be heard. I argue that in addition to its unique capacities to question and rebel against colonial authority, humor helps those who deploy it to resist victimhood and enact a psychological rebellion against the circumstances of colonialism and its legacies, and facilitates a sense of community through laughter among both those who deploy it and those who enjoy it as audience members. I establish a theoretical framework based in the work of Aristotle, Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud and Mikhail Bakhtin, then analyze four modes of humor— satire, irony, black humor, and the grotesque—as they are incorporated in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s Wizard of the Crow (Kenya, 2007); Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (India, 1997); Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (Pakistan; first published in 1988 as Ice-Candy Man); Man

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