In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015, humor has been regarded as serious, incendiary, and potentially fatal, business. A curious phenomenon has simultaneously occurred in contemporary art, as artists located around the world have turned to humorous aesthetic strategies in order to document and re-assess global politics, experiences of humanitarian crisis and collective trauma. This shift in art practice is evident across a broad spectrum of both geography and forms of ‘crisis’, from military occupation in the Palestinian Territories, the struggle for indigenous sovereignty in Australia, to economic crisis and austerity in Greece.
In spite of this turn, and although the politics of humor has attracted recent attention, leading scholars across the social sciences and humanities continually lament the lack of scholarly analysis on the subject. The need for a more sustained understanding of the role of humor in the face of crisis and humanitarian emergency is particularly pertinent when assessing contemporary art and visual culture. This is because, despite both the emphasis on trauma and crisis (which has remained a scholarly pre-occupation since the 1990s), visual culture theory has failed to adequately investigate why humor becomes pronounced in practice in times of emergency. Further, if the 21st century is characterized by the experience of perpetual crisis, then discourse has neglected to provide in-depth analysis of how humor offers a new understanding of this political context, whilst also suggesting how we might deal with such crises.
The Laughing in an Emergency Conference will be hosted on the 17th and 18th of April 2020 at the University of Manchester and will seek to address the now overdue field of inquiry. We welcome proposals from scholars and practitioners addressing the interface of humor and contemporary art from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives. We invite proposals for individual papers of approximately 20 minutes (allowing an extra ten minute for question/discussion time). Proposals should include a title, an abstract of approximately 300-350 words and a brief biography. Topics to be addressed include, but are not restricted to, the following: