MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | ’COMPARISON’ AS A MODE OF INQUIRY IN THE POST-COMPARATIVE WORLD

Humorlessness/Politics

APRIL 4 @ 6 P.M. | Daniel Family Commons, Usdan University Center

This paper addresses humorlessness as ontology, performance, and affect; and as threat and aspiration. It asks how the encounter with humorlessness structures the political scene and style of encounter, and how the encounter with it changes according to where people are in a relation of power. It looks at how unlearning attachment to some styles of it without humor on the other side have been modeled aesthetically as performance. Its cases range from the League of Revolutionary Black Workers’ documentary, Finally Got the News (1970) to some contemporary political art of Steve McQueen, William Pope.L, and Claire Pentecost. The talk is humorless, among other things. This is a first foray into a new project.