A Framework for Understanding and Cultivating the Transition from Arithmetic to Algebraic Reasoning

The essays in this special issue explore transnational influence on American comic practices, forms, and themes in response to “American Humor and Matters of Empire: A Proposal and Invitation.”1 There, addressing long-standing concerns about the splintering of humor studies in the US cultural context into multiple silos, I proposed “matters of empire” as a way for humor scholars to think more broadly across media, genres, and subject positions by considering how, and with what ideological significance, American comic practices rely on conventions—for example, stock characters, jokes, and plots, traditional genres, rhetorical forms, and tropes—born of unequal political relationships between the US and other nations.2 That is, I suggested that the matter and manner of American humor reflect the influences not only of former British and other colonizers of North America but also of US colonization, literal and metaphorical, of native and immigrant populations on this continent and beyond. American theatrical and film comedies acquired many of their plots and characters from the British stage, for instance, and other genres in every medium likewise bear the marks of other imperial relations. This conception implies three broad relationships shaping comic form and content: colonial continuity that sustains inherited imperial practices in the local context; postcolonial resistance that reverses (or otherwise amends) imperial traditions, embracing the anti-aristocratic and populist ideologies of the post-Revolutionary United States; and neocolonial hybridization that marks the domestic absorption of international cultures by the American imperium. The latter category recognizes that distinct ethnic comic traditions morph in response to US social and political contexts, yet also constitute the multicultural historical whole.The eleven presentations at the 2020 Quarry Farm Symposium dramatically expanded the scope and significance of my conception, addressing comic examples of imperial influence across more than two centuries of North American cultural history.3 Including John Wharton Lowe's keynote address, five studies—nearly half the program—probed Native American and African American comic expression, exploring examples from fine art painting, newspaper cartoons, literary fiction, memoir, and stand-up comedy. I mention these five partly to highlight participants’ interest in considering these areas as hybrid traditions of (neo)colonization, but also to explain their absence here. Two grew out of their authors’ articles in the recent StAH issue on Native American humor; those on African American literary and stand-up comedy may yet appear in the upcoming “Black Laughs Matter” special issue to be edited by Darryl Dickson-Carr, whose stunning analysis of Afro-pessimism in US literary satire closed the event.4The four articles that follow, nonetheless, cover a range of media, themes, and matters of empire in examples from the 1840s to the present, and I'm especially pleased that the issue includes a contribution received through regular editorial channels along with three revised and expanded presentations from the symposium. The authors marshal theoretical insights from, among others, Michel Foucault, Hélène Cixous, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Kenneth Burke, and Kyla Wazana Tompkins to supplement their own arguments, the relevant scholarly literature, and my framework, grounded in Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism. Individually and as a group, the authors also show how a more broadly constituted canon of comic materials reflects distinct moments in US cultural and political history and illuminates their significance. Thus, each article conducts specialized investigations into particular comic creations, creators, genres, media, politics, and periods while also tying the comic matters-of-empire project to larger theoretical, historical, and cultural concerns. Together, this set of analyses demonstrates the potential of matters of empire for reframing American humor studies in a transnational context. The StAH editorial team joins me in encouraging further exploration of these ideas as scholars see fit to explore, apply, or refine them.Opening the issue, “Gendered Comic Traditions: How Fanny Fern's Satire Subverts Nineteenth-Century Colonial Continuity and Enables Twenty-First Century Neocolonial Hybridity” by James Caron traces ties between early nineteenth-century British satirical writing and antebellum American periodical satire, a much-overlooked tradition that he calls “comic belles lettres.” Caron's earlier work on this material was instrumental in my formulation of the colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial taxonomy of American comic rhetoric, as it showed me how Walter Blair's binary between “native” and British comic practices had marginalized a wide swath of popular and influential humor in favor of the noisy innovations of the Down East and Old Southwestern traditions.5Caron's contribution in this issue goes much further, tracing previously unrecognized lines of descent from the antebellum period into our own time. After he demonstrates the breadth—and limits—of Anglo-American continuity in antebellum periodical satire, Caron demonstrates how its neocolonial offshoot endures as a legacy into the present. Caron argues that Lewis Gaylord Clark based his performance as an American gentleman humorist in the Knickerbocker magazine of the 1840s and '50s on the British model of Addison and Steele's periodical satire of amiability and that the American critic George William Curtis, similarly, developed a theory of the more caustic satire of William Makepeace Thackeray's novels to fit within the gentlemanly paradigm of comic belles lettres. But the inability of that paradigm to absorb Fanny Fern, the not-so-genteel comic persona of Sara Willis Parton's satire, exposes both the gender limits of Anglo-American amiability and the threat of her persona to that colonial mode. She bursts the masculine, aristocratic satiric mold and inaugurates feminist satire in a mode that Caron identifies with Hélène Cixous's laugh of the Medusa. As he explains, “To resist the patriarchal system is to appear to be monstrous, to apparently threaten symbolic death, but that fear misunderstands how the Medusa figures a woman's power to mock and ridicule.” In identifying her satire as manifesting the divergence of characteristics of British descent (and their reception) into gentleman and Medusa branches, with their own trajectories, Caron lays out two phases of comic belles lettres as a distinct matter of empire in the transatlantic context, and the implications of Anglo-American continuity are still unfolding today in stand-up and film comedy as well as in comic writing in print.Next, in “The Cuban Question and the Ignorant American: Empire's Tropes and Jokes in Yankee Notions,” Sarah Sillin documents how postcolonial and neocolonial joking jointly advanced US imperial ambitions during the magazine's 1852-75 run. As she demonstrates, soon after the Mexican War and nearly half a century before the Spanish-American War, editor Thomas L. Strong's Yankee Notions; or Whittlings from Jonathan's Jack-Knife framed Cuba as a viable acquisition, economically tempting if vexatiously foreign. Traditions of Down East humor, especially the rustic naïf, Sillin observes, merged “resistance to the British Empire with neocolonial jokes.” Sillin's analysis bears out my speculation about vernacular humor as a postcolonial screen obscuring US colonization of Native peoples and enslaved Africans with evidence that “the ebbs and flows in allusions to Cuba” in cartoons, anecdotes, and sketches in this influential magazine “indicate the extent to which the colony was viewed as unimportant by US Americans, even as they relied on it to define US identity.” These representations of Cuba linked potential acquisition of the island to concerns over whiteness, paternalism, English-language use, and (lack of) Americanness. Mocking Americans’ and Cubans’ ignorance underscored Yankees’ sense of postcolonial innocence, Sillin observes: “The humor in Yankee Notions often entwines regional, national, and transnational humor in ways that emphasize the formative role transnational encounters played in shaping local and national identities.” She therefore not only enhances our understanding of humor's importance in nineteenth-century periodical culture but also provides key insights into the nation's early flirtations with territorial expansion beyond North American shores and into the association between comic pleasure and (inter)national expansion. The persistence of these themes and tropes across genres highlights the value of mining periodicals for how varied contents mirror each other. In this context, her work more broadly also affirms humor's role in the avant-garde: the low stakes of comic rhetoric belie its power as a highly social mode that inspires circulation and acceptance of controversial ideas as readers seek to share a laugh.Stanley Orr brings our attention to the twentieth-century American imperium in “‘I wonder which of you is real’: The Indigenous Confidence Man in John Kneubuhl's ‘The Night of the Two-Legged Buffalo,’” which explores postcolonial and neocolonial humor in a perhaps unexpected context: the television comic drama. Orr details Samoan American playwright John Kneubuhl's “lifelong engagement with postcolonial thematics as well as Indigenous Polynesian and metropolitan comic traditions” manifest in scripts for Hawaii Five-O, Gunsmoke, and The Wild Wild West, as well as in works for mainland and Pacific stages. (I greatly appreciate Orr's use of “metropolitan” to denote the cultural force of empire.) In particular, Kneubuhl grafts the Samoan clowning tradition of fale aitu—a carnivalesque genre of satire, caricature, and antiauthoritarian ridicule featuring an Indigenous conman-trickster—onto TV's Anglo-American neocolonial celebrations of white expansion. Orr's examination of archival scripts and their reliance on models such as Kneubuhl's friend Sam Amalu, an authentic Hawaiian trickster, shows how thoroughly the playwright's Indigenous background informed his genre-stretching westerns. A rich set of conflicts between colonizer and colonized results as Kneubuhl's genre-bursting teledramas juggle white and Native responses to US imperial expansion, mainland and Pacific, present and past. Farcical costumes, slapstick antics, and feigned identities produce hilarious comedy in the Wild Wild West episode “The Night of the Two-Legged Buffalo,” even as the corruption, theft, and political threats driving its plot create tragic irony. In concluding that “Kneubuhl's stage and screen aesthetics… refuse simple adaptation to and absorption into the neocolonial culture industries of the metropolis,” Orr articulates how the hybrid rhetoric of postcolonial and neocolonial humor constitutes the polyphonic US imperium. The colonized subject, exiled from Native cultural practices and distanced from metropolitan counterparts, channels his doubled sensibility into a contrapuntal line whose harmonies and dissonance enrich and challenge hegemonic themes.Closing the issue is Christopher J. Gilbert's “Caricature and the Colonization Machine: The Nib's ‘Empire’ Issue as a Comic Stretch of the Imagination.” Gilbert treats matters of empire in three ways: as a theme in the Nib's cartoons about literal and metaphorical imperial theft; as a set of tropes in the visual distortions of caricature, a satiric mode that circulated via European imperialism; and as a rhetorical machine that produces and reproduces political and cultural practices of domination and theft. Here transgressions by the US imperium stand among many examples of international colonization as instances of the “aesthetic pretensions” and nationalism of empires—reflected, for example, in Britain's theft of the Elgin Marbles and acquisition of the Easter Island Hoa Hakananai'a and in Donald Trump's efforts to add himself to Tunkasila Sakpe Paha (Six Grandfathers Mountain), renamed by settler culture as Mount Rushmore. However, Gilbert's most important contributions come from his insights into caricature as a distorting mirror of “rhetorical struggles over the images and ideas that a society has of itself” and of imperialism itself as a rigid, repetitive Bergsonian “rhetorical machine, operating on singular impressions of political, cultural, and other forms of dominion.” Framing the colonization machine as a rhetorical instantiation of the notion that imperialism sows its own destruction, Gilbert presents imperialism as already at least implicitly self-parodic.Gilbert's conclusion, thus, makes a fitting coda for the special issue. Matters of empire—decidedly plural as themes, rhetorical modes, and intercultural relations—imbue American humor with the ideological incongruities of dual, even dueling, visions. Exile/colonial, portrait/caricature, reality/parody, metropolis/colony: matters of empire and the rhetorical standpoints that they inform ensure that comic expression in the United States not only bears the stamp of local people, ideas, and places but also bears witness to US roles in the world then and now. Humor charts and resists those roles because comic expression creates meaning from incongruity, and evolution has disposed us to find such complexities engaging, pleasurable, and memorable both individually and in communion with others.Together the four analyses in this issue of StAH suggest the wealth of materials and insights that await scholars who explore matters of empire in American comic genres, media, and eras not represented here. Like Kate Morris and Linda Morris and other authors exploring Native American humor in the special issue of fall 2020 as well as the Quarry Farm Symposium speakers on stand-up comedy and film, Caron, Sillin, Orr, and Gilbert point to the value of an expanded, contrapuntally inflected archive of American comic expression in which examples retain their distinctiveness even as they reveal shared tropes and preoccupations. New analytical tools, theoretical frameworks, interpretations, and taxonomies—such as those suggested here and in my matters-of-empire proposal—invite new and revised analyses of American comic expression that consider its ideological implications and cultural significance. Internationally circulated performance and visual media such as film, television, and comics promise further knowledge about the comic power of anti-imperialist standpoints, as Orr and Gilbert demonstrate, yet Caron and Sillin prove that recovering previously marginalized and regional materials can reveal startling, significant political facts and lines of influence. All enrich American humor studies as a field of historical and cultural scholarship. In treating comic practices as vehicles for social and political values, we build on the work of earlier generations of humor scholars even as we shift from nationalist models of American exceptionalism to transnational hybrid frameworks that underscore imperial ties, postcolonial resistance, and neocolonial accommodation. I look forward to seeing further efforts at understanding matters of empire in American humor as they bear more fruit in StAH's pages and elsewhere.