{"title":"The Power of Laughter: Jessie Redmon Fauset and the Racial and Gender Politics of Humor","authors":"Sabrina Fuchs Abrams","doi":"10.5325/studamerhumor.8.2.0360","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Humor by African American women writers has been largely overlooked and undervalued owing in part to the misguided expectation of feminine, subordinate behavior that precludes the expression of aggression and irreverence associated with humor. This article reappraises Jessie Redmon Fauset’s reputation as a sentimental, bourgeois female writer, looking at how she uses irony and satire to challenge racial and gender stereotypes and become a pioneering female humorist of the Harlem Renaissance. In her essay “The Gift of Laughter” and her best-known novel, Plum Bun (1928), Fauset uses humor as an indirect form of social protest to subvert racial and gender stereotypes of the New Woman and the New Negro Woman and to unsettle bourgeois, sentimental conventions of the marriage plot and the passing plot. Through a reframing of Fauset’s novel in light of recent theories of Black feminist humor, this article helps to restore Fauset’s rightful place among the leading and lasting voices of the Harlem Renaissance.","PeriodicalId":53944,"journal":{"name":"Studies in American Humor","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9000,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Studies in American Humor","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.5325/studamerhumor.8.2.0360","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
ABSTRACT:Humor by African American women writers has been largely overlooked and undervalued owing in part to the misguided expectation of feminine, subordinate behavior that precludes the expression of aggression and irreverence associated with humor. This article reappraises Jessie Redmon Fauset’s reputation as a sentimental, bourgeois female writer, looking at how she uses irony and satire to challenge racial and gender stereotypes and become a pioneering female humorist of the Harlem Renaissance. In her essay “The Gift of Laughter” and her best-known novel, Plum Bun (1928), Fauset uses humor as an indirect form of social protest to subvert racial and gender stereotypes of the New Woman and the New Negro Woman and to unsettle bourgeois, sentimental conventions of the marriage plot and the passing plot. Through a reframing of Fauset’s novel in light of recent theories of Black feminist humor, this article helps to restore Fauset’s rightful place among the leading and lasting voices of the Harlem Renaissance.
期刊介绍：
Welcome to the home of Studies in American Humor, the journal of the American Humor Studies Association. Founded by the American Humor Studies Association in 1974 and published continuously since 1982, StAH specializes in humanistic research on humor in America (loosely defined) because the universal human capacity for humor is always expressed within the specific contexts of time, place, and audience that research methods in the humanities strive to address. Such methods now extend well beyond the literary and film analyses that once formed the core of American humor scholarship to a wide range of critical, biographical, historical, theoretical, archival, ethnographic, and digital studies of humor in performance and public life as well as in print and other media. StAH’s expanded editorial board of specialists marks that growth. On behalf of the editorial board, I invite scholars across the humanities to submit their best work on topics in American humor and join us in advancing knowledge in the field.
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