*CFP* "INTERNET, HUMOR, AND NATION IN LATIN/X AMERICA", EDITED VOLUME

The internet is both a medium, the latest in a long line of previous mass media, and a space of trans-individuation and collective co-creation. As a media channel and a format, it tends to privilege certain forms, lengths, affects. As a commons, it is nurtured by all participants and shapes their affects and subjectivities in ways that have deep cultural, economic, political consequences inside and outside the nation. As a relatively de-territorialized space, it interacts in myriad ways with the forms of cultural and political territorialization of the nation. Finally, as a communicational infrastructure, the internet is tied in more classical ways to the geopolitics of information production and circulation.

Humor, on the other hand, is often based on mechanisms of superiority, relief, or incongruity. As theorized by Simon Critchley, for example, ethnic humor in a national context is an instance of superiority-based humor. It functions like “a secret code” that is shared by all those who belong to the ethnos and it produces a context and community-based ethos of superiority. This superiority is expressed in two ways: first, foreigners do not share our sense of humor or simply lack a sense of humor. Secondly, foreigners are themselves funny and worth laughing at. Thus, humor plays a key role in the signaling of boundaries of identity—who stands inside or outside significant creative spaces. With the nature of the internet and humor in mind, we are seeking contributions for a volume provisionally titled Internet, Humor, and Nation in Latin/x America.

We ask: if what we described above is the case in a nation-based context, how does the internet alter, confirm, heighten, or deflate the dynamics of humor? If internet-based humor is a relief, what is it a relief of or from? What are the syntactics and semantics specific to internet humor? What is the specific logic of internet-based humor? In the internet context, what is incongruous? When it comes to humor, what relationships does the audiovisual aspect of the internet enter into with its written side? What kinds of humor go viral and which don’t, and why? What role does humor itself play in the affective and economic structure of the internet?

We are seeking original articles for an edited collection on the role of internet humor in the definition of cultural, economic, political, and social national and transnational processes and critiques. Within this context, recent precedents on the topic of humor in modern media are Jody Baumgartner and Jonathan Morris’s Laughing Matters: Humor and American Politics in the Media Age (Routledge, 2008), which examines the role of humor in US politics—along with David Thorne’s The Internet is a Playground (Penguin, 2011), exemplifying a performative disposition—and articles like Luis Loya García’s “Latino Humor in Comparative Perspective.” In the spirit of Cualca (AR), País de Boludos (AR), Greg News (BR), Porta dos Fundos (BR), Actualidad Panamericana (CO), La Pulla (CO), Upsocl (CL), El Deforma (MX), El Pulso de la República (MX), Gente Como Uno (PE), or Remezcla (US), we hope to contribute to the study of the interaction among humor, nation, and the internet. While much work to date in this field has focused on satire—see Paul Alonso’s Satiric TV in the Americas (Oxford, 2018), which discusses the impact of streaming—we are interested in all types of internet-based humor practices (cutting across formats and media).

The volume aims at exploring, from a multi and interdisciplinary open perspective, the diverse ways in which cyber-humor is created, produced, consumed, used, circulated, reproduced, reacted to. On the whole, we are interested in the significance of cyber-discourses and cyber-narratives in the context of local, national, regional, transnational, and global cultural production, commercial ventures, material culture, audiences, education, government policy, and community practices.

Potential contributors should send a 500 to 1,000 word abstract, a short bio & bibliography, and complete contact information to Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste (fernandez@gsu.edu) and Juan Poblete (jpoblete@ucsc.edu).

Deadline for abstracts: May 1, 2020

Notification of accepted abstracts by May 15, 2020

Deadline for complete selected essays: November 1, 2020

Language of submission: English

Style: MLA

Contributors of selected essays must secure permission to reproduce any images.