Suchergebnisse

Introduction: Brexit, Comedy and Populism -- Leave or Remain? Unpacking the Dichotomies of the EU Referendum and Brexit Populism -- Brexit, Irony and Populist Politics -- Brexit Populism, Trickster Irony and Comic Responses -- Brexit Anti-Populism, Caricature and Critique -- Brexit, Social Class and Comedy -- "Brexit Means Breakfast": The Language of Brexit and Comedy -- Incongruity, Transition and the Shifting Landscape of Brexit Britain -- Conclusion: Politics and Satire in Post-Referendum Britain.

An engaging exploration of modern, late modern and fluid or postmodern humour, Weaver draws on the social theory of Zygmunt Baumann to examine the linguistic structure of humour, arguing that, being similar to metaphor, it is prone to be convincing. Deconstructing the dominant form of racism aimed at black people in the US, and Asians in the UK, this book shows how it expresses and supports racial stereotypes, while exploring the forms of resistance presented by Black and Asian comedians.

This article examines reactions to the October 2005 publication of the Prophet Muhammad cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. It does so by using the concept of 'liquid racism'. While the controversy arose because it is considered blasphemous by many Muslims to create images of the Prophet Muhammad, the article argues that the meaning of the cartoons is multidimensional, that their analysis is significantly more complex than most commentators acknowledge, and that this complexity can best be addressed via the concept of liquid racism. The article examines the liquidity of the cartoons in relation to four readings. These see the cartoons as: (1) a criticism of Islamic fundamentalism; (2) blasphemous images; (3) Islamophobic and racist; and (4) satire and a defence of freedom of speech. Finally, the relationship between postmodernity and the rise of fundamentalism is discussed because the cartoons, reactions to them, and Islamic fundamentalism, all contain an important postmodern dimension.

This article outlines the 'reverse discourses' of black, African-American and Afro-Caribbean comedians in the UK and USA. These reverse discourses appear in comic acts that employ the sign-systems of embodied and cultural racism but develop, or seek to develop, a reverse semantic effect. I argue the humour of reverse discourse is significant in relation to racism because it forms a type of resistance that can, first, act rhetorically against racist meaning and so attack racist truth claims and points of ambivalence. Second, and connected to this, it can rhetorically resolve the ambiguity of the reverse discourse itself. Alongside this, and paradoxically, reverse discourses also contain a polysemic element that can, at times, reproduce racism. The article seeks to develop a means of analysing the relationship between racist and non-racist meaning in such comedic performance.

In the context of contemporary European labour migration, where the most publicised pattern of labour migration sees Eastern European migrants move West, the dominant scholarly interpretation of Polish jokes is not applicable for the analysis of much of the joking by or about the Poles. Humour scholars frequently categorise jokes about ethnic groups into stupid or canny categories, and the Poles have been the butt of stupidity ('Polack') jokes in Europe and the United States. Today, in the European Union, Polish stupidity stereotyping in humour is less active and the Polish immigrant is hard working and a threat to indigenous labour, yet joking does not depict this threat in a canny Pole. The article applies the liminal concept of the trickster – an ambiguous border crosser or traveller – to elaborate some of the characteristics of jokes told by and about Polish migrants in the EU, mainly in the British context. A more robust explanatory framework is thus offered than is currently available in humour studies.

Research highlights how coexisting institutional logics can sometimes offer opportunities for agency to enterprising actors in organizational fields. But macro- and micro-level studies using this framework diverge in their approach to understanding the consequences of institutional complexity for actor autonomy, and correspondingly in the opportunities they identify for agents to resist, reinterpret or make judicious use of institutional prescriptions. This paper seeks to bridge this gap, through a longitudinal, comparative case study of the trajectories of four ostensibly similar change initiatives in the same complex organizational field. It studies the influence of three dominant institutional logics (professional, market and corporate) in these divergent trajectories, elucidating the role of mediating influences, operating below the level of the field but above that of the actor, that worked to constrain or facilitate agency. The consequence for actors was a divergent realization of the relationship between the three logics, with very different consequences for their ability to advance their interests. Our findings offer an improved understanding of when and how institutional complexity facilitates autonomy, and suggests mediating influences at the level of the organization and the relationship it instantiates between carriers of logics, neglected by macro- and micro-level studies, that merit further attention.