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This chapter will begin by arguing that the Jamel Comedy Club has played a significant role in boosting the visibility of up-and-coming young comedians from France’s banlieues (run-down suburbs) and/or ethnic minority backgrounds in the aftermath of the suburban unrest of autumn 2005. In effect, it created a space for identity negotiation that assessed what it meant to be French and from the banlieues and/or an ethnic minority. This chapter will argue that the way that many of the performers in the Jamel Comedy Club position themselves by using their ethnic or racial origins as the basis for their material is a relatively new development in French humour. Furthermore, it is an approach that becomes problematic when it comes to jokes about racial/ethnic groups that are not represented by performer within the Jamel Comedy Club.

After exploring the general impact of the 2015 terrorist attacks on French humour and humorists, this conclusion will focus on the perennial question of ‘peut-on rire de tout?’ (can one laugh about everything?) in order to assess contemporary attitudes to humour in France. It will then broaden its focus to consider what humour can achieve before focusing on what the four case studies examined here demonstrate about French humour and the ways in which if focuses on others and otherness. It will map out ways in which the four case studies constitute significant indicators of changes in contemporary French society during a turbulent period for the French nation.

This chapter explores the long history of visual stereotypes of African Americans from the print era through the celluloid images rooted in the minstrel tradition. It also recognizes the tremendous influence of mass media on American culture and public opinion, particularly during war. Beginning in World War I, governments on both sides of the conflict used the medium of film to recruit, train, and influence soldiers and citizens.

The chapter describes the way in which the mass media have handled the occupation. It suggests that Israel has concentrated on building an “Information Wall” that separates between the Arab and the Israeli societies, blocking information on what is happening in Palestinian society in particular – and thus perpetuating reciprocal stereotypes. The “Information Wall” grew higher as the physical distance between the rival populations decreased, remaining stable and effective after occupation of the territories. The Wallkeepers are developing immanent interests in perpetuating the “Information Wall” which is far more difficult to topple than a physical wall.

Muslim women activists, who struggle against, on the one hand, stereotypical perceptions of Muslim women while also having to cope with traditions of male social dominance in both Muslim and non-Muslim communities, find it especially difficult to work in and be recognised as part of the European environment. This chapter analyses the growing political visibility of Muslim women in Italy and the UK. The lens of gender offers a privileged insight into the two political systems and stimulates an interesting debate on national identity. The study sets out to counter mainstream research approaches on Muslims in Europe that focus on deviant behaviours and terrorism-related issues. Instead of blindly following the ‘domestication of Islam’ agenda pursued by many European governments, this research looks at and tries to understand the interesting dynamics involving Muslims that are taking place across Europe.

From the air, the international airport in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, does not appear to be in the middle of anything except the desert. But every winter it becomes a center of intense activity and often high tension, as green beans from throughout the country pour into the airport packhouses. If all goes well, the beans are flown out the same day they are trucked in, and end up on dinner tables in France. In fact, things often do not go well, and so many green beans end up in soup pots closer to home. Indeed, the abundance of delicate green beans found in Burkina Faso’s marketplaces during January and February testifies to the frequent failures of the country’s export ambitions. Green beans and other garden vegetables were brought to colonial Burkina Faso (then Upper Volta) in the early 20th century by French missionaries and colonial administrators who, apart from their personal interest in having these familiar foods available, saw the introduction of French vegetable gardening as part of their civilizing mission in Africa. They did not care much whether Africans ate à la francais, but they did hope that market gardening (or maraichage) would help feed growing colonial towns and, in the process, create a modern, industrious, prosperous and thus stable African peasantry. Decades later in independent Upper Volta, remarkably similar goals fueled government and foreign development agency efforts to promote irrigated vegetable production for overseas markets. Especially when repeated droughts in the 1960s and 1970s raised concerns about long-term climate change, it appeared that peasants needed the income that irrigated, high-value export crops could provide in order to make up for possible shortfalls in rainy season staple grain production. So with generous foreign technical and financial assistance, the country’s state-run peasant cooperatives became in the late 1960s some of sub-Saharan Africa’s earliest exporters of airfreight fresh green beans. For many years, its export volume was second only to Kenya’s. By the late 1990s, Burkina Faso’s green bean farmers missed the days when their crops were known as “green gold.”

Seven years after Britain’s government in 1996 admitted to the potentially catastrophic human health risks of mad cow disease, fears of the deadly pathogen had faded. Scientists had neither a vaccine nor a cure for nCJD, but in early 2003 they downgraded the projected infection rates; tens of thousands of cases of nCJD now appeared unlikely. The domestic beef market had recovered, and even long-critical media commentators said it was time for beef “to have a revival” (Lawrence 2003a). Whether for reasons of safety, taste or patriotism, market surveys indicated that consumers now preferred British beef to imported meats (Mintel 2003). They also worried rather less about overall food safety. According to the government’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) annual Consumer Attitudes Survey, the percentage of consumers who described themselves as “very” or “quite” concerned about food safety had dropped to 68 percent in 2002 down from 71 percent the year before.1 This is still a lot of concern, but the government nonetheless concluded that it had “made some headway” in its efforts to win back public trust. At the international level, however, longstanding food controversies still simmered and sometimes flared. Zambia, for example, set off a round of transatlantic name-calling in late 2002 when, despite impending famine, it refused to distribute genetically modified (GM) food aid from the United States. The U.S. trade secretary accused the “Luddite” Europeans of forcing Africans to go hungry because the Zambians, like other southern African agro-exporters, feared losing access to the European market if American GM corn contaminated their own crops. European NGOs, meanwhile, condemned the United States for using food aid to establish an African beachhead for the biotech industry (Vidal 2002; Teather 2003). Media analysis of this controversy gave little attention to Zambian citizens’ views of GM food, emphasizing instead the striking rift between American and European perspectives on GM foods and food quality more generally. As in past coverage of the transatlantic GM battle, the explanation was partly cultural (Europeans simply care more about taste than shelf life), partly social psychological. The trauma of recent food scares, in other words, had left Europeans suspicious of “unnatural” foods even if “science” insisted they were safe.

In her chapter, Yu Haibo explores the attitudes of Han university administrators, and stresses the importance of listening to and surveying mainstream attitudes on ethnic minorities and minority education. Based on in-depth interviews with twenty university administrator in 2010 and 2011, Yu demonstrates how a range of opinions co-exists among Han educators, including discriminatory perceptions of minorities as slow, violent and/or backward. She calls for further education, but also stresses that the minorities themselves have an important role to play in leading by example, allowing their own efforts to shine through with the help of their teachers and other educators.

Pursuing arguments made by Adilifu Nama in Race on the QT, it demonstrates that the films foreground and criticize the racialized and racist terms of the material they are working with. In reflecting on past representations, the films are also reflecting on present representations, and thus on contemporary culture. They testify to an awareness of the historicity of all representations. The chapter argues that the films’ awareness of the complexity of racial representations, of their history, of the racial construction of all bodies, of the multiplicity of identities, of the difficulty of establishing a relationship with another without excluding someone else, of the necessity and limitations of deconstruction and resignification, prove that they are not instances of shameless white appropriation but problematized engagements with racial politics.

This chapter focuses first on the relation between gender and genre conventions on the general level, then on how the narratives are often based on an assault on patriarchy, third on the linguistic deconstruction of gender effected through the usage of specific words, and finally on how some of the major concerns of feminist film theories are taken into account in the figuration of the body. I argue that deconstructing the material his films are based on enables Tarantino to come to terms with genre films and, more generally, cinema, and, in turn, qualify the theories he engages with. In so doing, his cinematic metafictions endeavor to resolve the contradiction between the celebration and the deconstruction of film genre: redeeming it by queering it, so to speak

This chapter argues that Lynn Nottage employs the trickster figure in her plays to destabilize African American stereotypes. In her plays Fabulation and By the Way, Meet Very Stark, Nottage also provides metacommentary in order to directly provoke the audience. Ultimately, these plays point to a future that rejects these stereotypes.

Decrying suburbia at the fin de siècle placed a speaker in a long literary and cultural tradition; Gissing, Wells, Bennett, and Forster inherited images and terms of culturally and aesthetically arid, bourgeois suburbia that had been in circulation for decades. The stereotyping of suburbia in the early to mid-Victorian years was one way of attempting to limit the increasing cultural force of the middle classes: the image of the dull, identikit suburb was a stereotype employed in the service of an aristocratic ideology that emerged at a time of upper-class retreat.

Novels set in suburban locales represent a world in flux. Beneath the shifting sands of social mobility run thick strands of apparently common knowledge that reassure readers of continuity with the past and the existence of enduring values. These values—such as suspicion of suburban homes’ commodity status, the charge of vulgar furnishing—undoubtedly express suspicion of the new masses. But they also form a means of fostering connections, shared perspectives, in a time of dizzying change.

Chapter 4 by Kristin Burr examines the ways in which the hero and heroine make themselves “other” within the courtly system in Gerbert de Montreuil’s Le Roman de la Violette. Initially forced into the role of outsider as they face reversals in fortune, both characters then consciously adopt the role, resisting attempts to categorize them easily. They transform their identities through stories that others impose upon them and the tales that they tell about themselves, inviting the audience to question assumptions concerning chivalry, love, the qualities of a courtly lady, and gender stereotypes. Focusing on episodes that center on a ring, the chapter points to the gap between words and acts and argues for nuancing the understanding of activity and passivity in the tale. It demonstrates that the object plays a key role in establishing identity and reintegrating the couple fully into the courtly world.

In the months following the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation, a commercially and politically advantageous ethos of authenticity induced the emergence of respectful representations of black soldiers in northern illustrated newspapers. Theodore R. Davis’s September 1863 Harper’s Weekly sketch “The Rebels’ Last Device” discounted most acknowledged conventions of such representations and defied two deeply engrained stereotypes of African Americans rooted in antebellum abolitionist and racialized imagery: the scourged, nude slave, and the racist-scientific “Negro Type.” In his depiction of a dead and manipulated black corporal from the Third United States Colored Regiment, Davis elevated the ethos of authenticity to offer a vision of African American humanity that imagined black soldiers as possible social and political equals.