On Second Thought

Editors:

Had Kate Morris and Linda Morris published "Camping Out with Miss Chief: Kent Monkman's Ironic Journey" while I was still writing "American Humor and Matters of Empire," I would certainly have cited their essay as an exemplar.¹ Their discussion of how Monkman's paintings satirize the European invasion of North America through ironic and camp parodies of imperialist iconography illustrates how matters of empire—representational and expressive practices acquired via unequal transnational political relationships—can draw marginalized voices, genres, and media into the mainstream of American humor studies while honoring their specific historical and political standpoints. In detailing how Monkman's comic critique filters imperialist representations through his native gaze, the Morrises' analysis in "Camping Out with Miss Chief" also exposes that critique as a specifically postcolonial rhetoric whose hybrid comic techniques construct its theme.

As presented by the Morrises, Monkman's humor counters racist representations of Native identity with a vision of universal humanism led by "a transcendent, transgender figure, shepherding all of her people into the future."² This trickster serves as the chief agent of his challenge to Euro-settler hegemony, but Monkman also draws on Native traditions of irony and parody to contest white nostalgic views of early contact and settlement (268-69). He does not, however, craft his nonverbal message in an Indigenous Cree tradition of vernacular materials and art forms, although he comically invokes (white images of) them in Artist and Model (2012), whose nearly nude Miss Chief in headdress and stilettos captures the image of a naked European as a stick figure on deerskin. Rather, Monkman brings his historical and ideological standpoint as a member of the Cree people to the representational practices of European art: monumental history paintings that celebrate conquest and colonization of North America.

Working in modern acrylic on canvas instead of oil, Monkman lifts landscapes from Albert Bierstadt, inserts iconic references to Edward Curtis, cites subjects from Paul Kane and figural groupings from Thomas Eakins, and invokes key moments in American history, such as the US Seventh Cavalry's defeat at Little Bighorn. Monkman then appropriates, reverses, and queers these matters of empire and their implied claims of Euro-American superiority, power, and domination for comic irony and satire. His imitation with a symbolic difference (to use Linda Hutcheon's definition of parody) creates a comic clash of incongruity that not only "underscores the degree to which stereotypes have historically been perpetuated through visual art" and "call[s] into question our most beloved myths of the Wild West," as the Morrises point out but also reveals the postcolonial hybridity animating his critique.³

Having the hybridity of Monkman's work so clearly delineated also inspired me to ask a new question: where do audiences fit in the comic rhetorics outlined by the matters-of-empire rubric? In focusing on the vectors of influence on comic genres and techniques, I had detailed humor's production at the expense of reception. But, of course, production aims at successful reception, and Monkman's queered application of imperialist materials to the standpoints of resistant subjects highlights the "post" in postcolonial: a dual audience of insiders and outsiders, the colonized people asserting their right to self-representation and the imperial masters confronting this reversed gaze in the ongoing struggle between First Nations and settler ones. And unlike the hybrid neocolonial humor of intersectionality, which Joanne Gilbert sees as "performing marginality" for an audience who pays (literally, in cash, for stand-up comedy) to see its hegemony unmasked, hybrid postcolonial humor makes the oppressor the butt of the joke.⁴

Indeed, the Morrises' analysis of the proudly naked, proudly androgynous Miss Chief suggests the degree to which she proudly embodies that postcolonial hybridity. The transgender two-spirit Share Eagle Testicle is also transhistorical in dress and time, a trickster within and—as the artist's alter ego—behind the canvas. Unlike the vernacular humor of the postcolonial Anglo-American experience that Walter Blair outlined in the 1930s, Monkman's comic sensibility as defined by Kate and Linda Morris "Camping Out with...