Black British Laughter

Chair: Dr Janine Bradbury

What kinds of laugh do we laugh when reading Black British literature? Laughter sometimes stems from comedy, but many of the laughs we laugh are noncomedic: we laugh to punctuate conversation, out of nervousness, embarrassment, awkwardness, and, indeed, often gratuitously. If laughter is sustained by an array of conflicting feelings, so too is aesthetic experience, and the laugh – its own kind of aesthetic judgment – often finds its justification outside the immediate context of the act. Drawing examples from Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956), Grace Nichols’s The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984), and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), I explore how these texts prompt us to think about when we laugh, why we laugh, who is laughing, and what that laughter might tell us about evolving conceptions of Black Britishness.

Graham Riach is a Departmental Lecturer in World Literature at the University of Oxford. While finishing one project – The Short Story After Apartheid  – he is beginning another, called Global Narratives of Ageing. He has published on African Literature, the short story, and the role of form and genre in the analysis of postcolonial and world literature. He is also a filmmaker, and has just finished a series of short films about complicity and perpetration in Germany during and after the Second World War.

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