Le rire et l’Autre

This course examines the rhetoric of laughter in French literatures through the lens of belonging and alterity. We will seek to develop a critical apparatus to answer the following questions: How does laughter unite us? How does it divide us? What makes it a generative practice for identity and community formation? Can it still be a tool, perhaps even a weapon, for justice and emancipation when alterity is used to justify social asymmetry? Our theoretical corpus will include works by Bakhtin, Baudelaire, Bergson, and Freud, who conceptualized laughter in wildly different ways—respectively as carnivalesque, satanic, sociable, and healing. In the 1940s, René Ménil, a Martinican philosopher, creolized early theories and further developed them into a means of resistance for colonial subjects.

To put these theories to work, we will first read two classic French, laughter-driven novels (by Rabelais and Voltaire) to explore how they conjugate laughter with the tropes of the traveler and the other differently in the Age of Discovery and in colonial/Enlightenment times. We will then turn to contemporary postcolonial works by minoritized francophone authors, filmmakers, and stand-up comedians (Bessora, Jean-Pascal Zadi, Shirley Souagnon, and Tahnee l’Autre, to name a few) to consider what it means to laugh from a paradoxical double position of belonging and alterity, to work from the margins to amuse the mainstream, all the while remaining determined to speak truth to power in a colorblind République universelle française.

This is a discussion-based class, one in which we construct meaning together. Each day, the instructor will lecture briefly to contextualize the readings and underline key aspects to be considered.