We are happy to announce that Simon Weaver, author of The Rhetoric of Racist Humour: US, UK and Global Race Joking, has recently been awarded the BSA’s SAGE Prize for Innovation and Excellence 2011.
The SAGE Prize for Innovation and Excellence is awarded annually to one paper in each of the BSA’s prestigious journals: Cultural Sociology, Sociological Research Online, Sociology and Work, Employment and Society. Simon was awarded the prize for his paper The ‘Other’ Laughs Back: Humour and Resistance in Anti-racist Comedy published in the BSA’s journal Sociology.
Simon’s book, The Rhetoric of Racist Humour, is an engaging exploration of modern, late modern and fluid or postmodern humour, drawing on the social theory of Zygmunt Baumann to examine the linguistic structure of humour, arguing that, being similar to metaphor, it is prone to be convincing.
Deconstructing the dominant form of racism aimed at black people in the US, and Asians in the UK, the book shows how it expresses and supports racial stereotypes, while exploring the forms of resistance presented by Black and Asian comedians.
Simon Weaver is Research Associate in the Department of Health Sciences at the University of Leicester, UK.
The Rhetoric of Racist Humour is scheduled for publication in October 2011. More information is available on our website.
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