{"product_id":"laughable-empire","title":"Laughable Empire","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn the nineteenth-century United States, jokes, comic anecdotes, and \u003ci\u003ebons mots\u003c\/i\u003e about the Pacific Islands and Pacific Islanders tried to make the faraway and unfamiliar either understandable or completely incomprehensible (i.e., “other”) to American readers. \u003ci\u003eA Laughable Empire\u003c\/i\u003e examines this substantial archival corpus, attempting to make sense of nineteenth-century American humor about Hawai‘i and the rest of the Pacific world.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTodd Nathan Thompson collects and interprets these comic, sometimes  racist depictions of Pacific culture in nineteenth-century American print culture. Drawing on an archive of almanac and periodical humor, sea yarns, jest books, and literary comedy, Thompson demonstrates how jokes and humor functioned sometimes in the service of and sometimes in resistance to US imperial ambitions. Thompson also includes Indigenous voices and jokes lampooning Americans and their customs to show how humor served as an important cultural contact zone between the United States and the Pacific world. He considers how nineteenth-century Americans and Pacific Islanders alike used humor to employ stereotypes or to question them, to “other” the unknown or to interrogate, laughingly, the process by which “othering” occurs and is disseminated.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIncisive and detailed, \u003ci\u003eA Laughable Empire\u003c\/i\u003e documents American humor about Pacific geography, food, dress, speech, and customs. Thompson sheds new light not only on nineteenth-century America’s imperial ambitions but also on its deep anxieties.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Pennsylvania State University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54258671354200,"sku":"9780271095059","price":39.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780271095059.jpg?v=1777716048","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/laughable-empire","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}