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Public Lecture by Judith Yaross Lee

Brother Jonathan Runs for President: Spoof Campaigns, the Janus Laugh, and the Rise of Donald Trump

Judith Yaross Lee (Distinguished Professor Emerita – Ohio University)

Thursday, 5 March at 2:00 PM in the Faculty Conference Hall (Hybrid event)

Abstract:

Since the 1830s, mock-campaigns for President of the United States have featured comic candidates descended from Brother Jonathan, the eighteenth-century folk figure who characterizes the ordinary American as the quintessential democratic citizen. Jonathan’s rustic innocence and virtue distinguish him from the corrupt politicians who arise from the elite, and thereby contribute to the two-faced joke—the Janus Laugh—underlying the past century’s many spoof campaigns: elitism in the form of populism. Via the reverse logic of irony and humor, nominations for unlikely spoof candidates endorse the status quo of seasoned politicians by implying that the alternative to elite leadership is a joke. Donald Trump’s 2016 candidacy demonstrates that the ideology of spoof campaigns also animates authentic runs for American political office.

Short bio:

Judith Yaross Lee is Distinguished Professor Emerita at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, USA, where she taught in the Rhetoric and Public Culture Program of the School of Communication Studies from 1990-2019. An interdisciplinary Americanist with a special interest in humor, Lee has published six books and five dozen book chapters and journal articles, including Seeing MAD: Essays on Mad Magazine’s Humor and Legacy (2020), “American Humor and Matters of Empire” (Studies in American Humor, 2020), and Twain’s Brand: Humor in Contemporary American Culture (2012). “Brother Jonathan Runs for President” grew from research conducted at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where she was 2016 Fulbright Senior Professor of American Culture.

Recommended reading: “Brother Jonathan Runs for President: Spoof Campaigns, the Janus Laugh, and the Rise of Donald Trump”

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Public Lecture by Oliver A. I. Botar

László Moholy-Nagy’s Feminist Entanglements

Oliver A. I. Botar, Professor of Art History, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada

Wednesday, March 20th, 16:00-17:30 (online event)

Recipient in 2022 of the prestigious Moholy-Nagy Award, Oliver A. I. Botar is Professor of Art History and Associate Director at the School of Art, University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. His Ph.D. (Toronto) was on Biomorphic Modernism and Biocentrism. The nexus of Biocentrism-Modernism, the Hungarian avant-garde, László Moholy-Nagy and the origins of new media art have been research focuses. He has lectured, published, and curated exhibitions in Canada, the US, Europe and Japan. He is author of Technical Detours: The Early Moholy-Nagy Reconsidered (2006), Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts (2014) as well as numerous articles, book chapters and exhibition catalogues. He is co-editor of Biocentrism and Modernism (with Isabel Wünsche, 2011), and telehor (with Klemens Gruber, 2013). Botar also works on Canadian art, publishing on Winnipeg Modernism, Lyonel LeMoine FitzGerald and Arthur Lismer, as well as the 2009 volume A Bauhausler in Canada: Andor Weininger in the ‘50s, and is currently working on a book on settler art in Winnipeg from 1913 to 1950. He has taught courses at the School of Art on “Canadian Art Since World War II,” “Prairie Modernism,” “Manitoba Modernism,” “Bauhaus-Canada” and “Art in Treaty One Territory.” He has curated a number of exhibitions on Canadian art, including, most recently, “Bauhaus (Canada) 101” at the School of Art Gallery (2020).

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Black Masculinities in the Age of #BLM: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty

Public Lecture by Prof. Pilar Cuder-Domínguez
Time and Venue: Wednesday, April 5, 2023, from 3 p.m to 4 p.m in Room 3302

This talk presents the research I did for the edited volume Detoxing Masculinity in Anglophone Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), which examines the representation of diverse black masculinities in Zadie Smith’s third novel, On Beauty (2005), attending to how they are segregated and policed but also how their borders can be often crossed. The fluidity of those identities is proved through the analysis of the fictional portrayal of the psychological struggle of a mixed-race young man, Levi Belsey, who has to choose the detoxed masculinity that will allow him to feel at home within his own skin but also to become a ‘good’ black man in his own terms. Following Mahtani (2014), Levi’s changing behaviour can be understood as an example of “racialized performativity’, characteristic of mixed race people. Underpinning my analysis is the notion that, in the age of #Black Lives Matter, a non-toxic masculinity is one that cultivates a broad ethics of social responsibility and that is therefore deeply imbricated with the struggle against all forms of oppression: racism, police brutality, violence against women, neo-colonial and extractive practices, etc. I argue that, in the character of Levi Belsey, Zadie Smith displays a profound understanding of the toxicity surrounding black youth and she outlines the contours of a de-toxed black masculinity in our times.

 

BIO

Pilar Cuder-Domínguez is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Huelva, Spain. Her research interests are the intersections of gender, genre, nation, and race. Her latest publications are the articles “The Legacy of Angélique in Late 20th-Century Black Canadian Drama” (Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2022) and “Black Disability and Diasporic Haunting in Diana Evans’s The Wonder” (Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 2022) and the open-access edited collection Cultural Representations of Gender Vulnerability and Resistance, with M.I. Romero Ruiz (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). She is currently team member of the international project Thanatic Ehics: The Circulation of Bodies in Migratory Spaces.

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Public Lecture by Rebecca Krefting

Hannah Gadsby: Emotional Capital and Affective Economies in Stand-Up Comedy

Rebecca Krefting (Skidmore College, USA; President of the American Humor Studies Association)

November 10, 2022 at 4 p.m. in the Conference Room of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (Uni Szeged)

Being a stand-up comedian requires skills: the ability to craft jokes and perform them; the capacity to “read the room” and adapt material during the performance; and facility with networking with fellow comics and industry gatekeepers. Comedians are performers as much as they are business entrepreneurs for their own brand. Negotiating these demands requires emotional capital, a concept connected to but departing from Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of cultural and social capital. Emotional capital “is a tripartite concept composed of emotion-based knowledge, management skills, and capacities to feel that links self-processes and resources to group membership and social location.” (Cottingham 2016, 452). Like other forms of capital, it is unequally distributed and identity-contingent. High levels of performances of emotional capital can inform success by ensuring good working relationships with others in the industry and developing content that will effectively elicit laughter across communities. Comics attuned to patterns of comedy patronage understand that they are selling entertainment as well as an emotional experience and learn to comply with affective dictates of this performance genre. But not all comics are compliant, nor can they be when affective demands posing as natural are meant to favor cis-gendered, heterosexual white men. By contrast, Tasmanian native Hannah Gadsby is a gender non-conforming, neurodiverse, white, lesbian stand-up comedian whose very existence in comedy venues as well as the comic material itself troubles traditional constructions of emotional capital necessary for effective comedy performance while simultaneously defying the emotions typically demanded from comic performances. She resists and is sometimes unable to deploy the kinds of emotional capital presumed necessary for securing success in the industry. Gadsby’s perceived deficiencies in emotional capital, tells us much about the ascendant affective economies circulating today—in green rooms and on stages across the world.

Cottingham, Marci D.  2016. “Theorizing Emotional Capital,” Theory and Society 45 (5): 451-470.

Rebecca Krefting, who goes by Beck, is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Center for Leadership, Teaching, and Learning. Her research specializations are feminist comedy studies; histories and historiographies of stand-up comedy; preppers and post-apocalyptic cultural texts; and pedagogical studies. Her monograph titled: All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents (Johns Hopkins UP) charts the history and economy of charged humor or humor aimed at social justice. She has published dozens of articles about stand-up comedy in edited collections, academic journals, and public forums and has presented nationally and internationally at universities and comedy symposiums, most recently at Dresden University of Technology and Leipzig University in Germany.

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Public Lecture by Dr Béatrice Laurent

Our next guest presenting in the TNT Public Lecture Series is Professor of Victorian Studies, Dr Béatrice Laurent, from the Bordeaux Montaigne University (Bordeaux, France). Her lecture “Sleeping Beauties in Victorian Britain: Cultural, Artistic and Literary Explorations of a Myth” will be held on April 18, 2018 at 5 p.m. in the Faculty’s Conference Room. For more details see the event’s flyer.