Satire, Humor and the Construction of Identities by Zekavat Massih;

Author:Zekavat, Massih; [Zekavat, Massih]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Published: 2017-06-12T13:28:07+00:00

However, Twark delimits her study to the construction of national identity via satire in a specific nation and epoch. As she does not indulge in theoretical discussions, she does not wish to generalize her argument. In this chapter, however, I have attempted to paint a broader picture of the role of humor and satire in the construction of national identities by arguing at a theoretical level.

In the following section of this chapter, I will attempt to show the validity of my argumentation and illustrate my theoretical discussions in a case study. Several critics have already suggested how literature has bearings on the conception of national identity at different times, of course. Jowitt (2006), for instance, observes that, Fletcher’s “The Island Princess is centrally concerned with human differences of nation and religion, of color and ethnicity. It is a play preoccupied by the “racial” markers that distinguish Europeans – specially Portuguese colonialists – from the indigenous inhabitants of the Spice Islands” (p. 287). Or Martin Butler (2006), writing on Renaissance masques, notes that,

Encounters with the Other were germane to masques, which made their political meanings by policing the borders between us and them, normal and monstrous, the strange and the familiar. Masques worked by staging the monarch’s ability to asset his power in the face of forces that contested it or were antithetical to it; and through their dismissal of outsiders, they instilled in performers and audience a collective sense of kinship, affirming a corporate identity by making lines of separation from those who were denied access to their community. Representatives of the exotic were thus intrinsic to the legitimization of monarch and court: masques constantly invoked racial, cultural, or social differences to underwrite whatever rules Whitehall took for normative.(p. 159)

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