Comedy, Fantasy and Colonialism (review)

This is a diverse collection of essays, ranging widely over space and time, and dealing with humor and satire from the perspectives of both colonizer and colonized. Thus Terri A. Hasseler shows how London Punch cartoonists used dress codes to satirize what they regarded as Curzon's overly tolerant behavior towards Indians after the 1857 "Mutiny"; there is an essay on carnival in Malta; Laura Salisbury discusses the jokes by and about the Irish in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; Phyllis Lassner analyzes the ironic stance of Olivia Manning and Rumer Godden regarding the behavior of expatriates in North Africa and India; James Watt contributes an informative account of James Morier's use of orientalism in his novels set in "Persia" in the early nineteenth century. Watt's essay would make an interesting comparison with Peter Merrington's analysis of the role of Africa in Masonic fantasy and symbolism. To end the collection, Paul Arthur writes about the 1751 fantasy, Peter Wilkins, supposedly set in the antipodes, a fantasy that Arthur views in the context of the eighteenth-century vogue for imaginary voyages, but also in the context of a developing romantic sensibility.

Four of the fourteen essays discuss comic and fantasy genres in cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora. One of the very few contributors to examine how indigenous concepts of humor and fantasy may differ from those of Europeans is Mark Lilleleht's informative study of Zulu narratives. Lilleleht tests the limits of theories of the fantastic established by Todorov and others in the light of definitions by the contemporary Xhosa storyteller Nongenile Masithathu Zenani and the nineteenth-century Zulu tale of Ukcombekcantsini, and makes a persuasive argument for the Zulu tale's narrative power and social meaning, its interweaving of the everyday and the symbolic, in the context of an increasingly unstable Zulu nation.

Lilleleht acknowledges but to some extent discounts the questions raised by the fact that the tale was told to and translated by an Anglican missionary. In "Fairies on the Veld: Foreign and Indigenous Elements in South African Children's Stories," Elwyn Jones foregrounds the issue of translation and adaptation of indigenous tales, revealing muddled motives and genres as well as anxieties that lurk behind rewriting of African tales for the consumption of white children. Ultimately the stories admitted the existence of black fairies (sometimes depicted as imps), but they were declared invisible to white children.

In "Cubans on the Moon, and Other Imagined Communities," Jill Lane provides a fascinating account of teatro bufo blackface performances and their significance in late nineteenth-century Cuba, as a means of satirizing contemporary politics while also imagining alternative spaces and identities. The moon was one such imagined space, but Africa was another that frequently recurs in the plays, and Lane describes an 1882 play, Bufos en Africa, about a group of blackface actors shipwrecked on the African coast, facing severe punishment for their impersonation, and also for their ancestral involvement in the enslavement of Africans in Cuba. Frustratingly, the manuscript is incomplete and we never discover the ultimate fate of this imaginary group of actors in this imaginary Africa. Lane's analysis of the theater, the role of blackface, and the use of imagined space, is richly informed, wonderfully readable and suggestive.

Graeme Harper's introduction perhaps rather lamely concludes that Comedy, Fantasy and Colonialism examines a number of instances of both comedy and fantasy in operation, "sometimes seeing that one contains or employs the other, but most notably establishing that a close examination of the function of these modes gives insight into the ways in which world views within the colonial environment are formed, confirmed and re-formed" (7). That is an accurate enough summary, but it does not do justice to the freshness and intellectual vitality of many of these essays, which are particularly innovative in their willingness to question received views of comedy and fantasy in the context of new terrains. There are the seeds here for several book-length studies, extending...