Overview
- Explores social media and humour to better understand how ordinary people make sense of their lived conditions
- Constitutes one of the first volumes to look at the politics of laughter on social media in the Global South
- Brings together a broad range of scholars to explore how laughter is used to define, critique, resist and mock power
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Table of contents (15 chapters)
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Social Media Humour, Commentary and Confronting Power
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Humour and the Everyday
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Race, Ethnicity and Gender Politics
Keywords
About this book
Reviews
“An original and sophisticated collection on laughter and ridicule in the global south in the age of digital media. This is a hard headed take which is as much about the robust ridiculing of the pretensions of postcolonial regimes, as about the dangers of the accelerated dispersion of prejudice and stereotype. A timely and exigent intervention”.
- Dilip M Menon, Mellon Chair in Indian Studies, Director Centre for Indian Studies in Africa
"This timely volume has brought the whole notion of laughter and its attendant politics in the age of social media to critical and I must add, academic and entertaining attention. Indeed, as the volume reveals chapter after chapter, the politics of laughter in the Global South has grown to prodigious proportion in the age of social and digital media – from what one contributor describes as “Coconut Kelz” in South Africa through the art of “laughing through trouble” in Zimbabwe to what another describes as “the prank of celebrity activism” in postcolonial Nigeria."
- Olufemi Abodunrin, Professor of English Studies and Performing Arts, University of Limpopo
"This is a superb volume of essays on the subject of laughter and ridicule as it is deployed to mock and put pressure on rogue postcolonial regimes by concerned citizens, with social media tapped into as a rich reservoir of political struggles and contestations between the powerful and the powerless! In this volume, laughter and ridicule emerge as a method and indeed a discourse of speaking truth to power."- Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Professor and Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South & member of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, University of Bayreuth, Germany
Editors and Affiliations
About the editor
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Politics of Laughter in the Social Media Age
Book Subtitle: Perspectives from the Global South
Editors: Shepherd Mpofu
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81969-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-81968-2Published: 04 November 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-81971-2Published: 05 November 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-81969-9Published: 03 November 2021
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXI, 314
Number of Illustrations: 10 b/w illustrations
Topics: Political Communication, Digital/New Media