Unsettling Laughter: Humor and Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Native Literature

This dissertation examines how nineteenth-century Native authors use humor as a tool of political resistance. In their writings in English, these writers use irony and sarcasm to satirize colonialism and ridicule white society’s erroneous misrepresentations of Indigenous character. Additionally, Native writers also use humor to foster solidarity with audiences and to imagine new political possibilities. As these Native authors resisted settler colonialism, contemporary white American writers use humor to enact settler logics and perpetuate ideological violence against Native peoples, sometimes unintentionally. In juxtaposing Native and white humorists in each chapter, this dissertation seeks to decenter whiteness from accounts of nineteenth-century humor and to demonstrate the wide availability of humor as a method of political protest and a language of self- and community-definition for Native peoples historically. Chapter 1 reads Pequot preacher William Apess’s Indian Nullification alongside Irving’s Tour on the Prairies to show how Apess and the Osages in Irving’s Tour use humor to satirize settler hypocrisy and pretension. Chapter 2 explores Cherokee writer John Rollin Ridge’s Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1855) with selections of George Washington Harris’s Sut Lovingood stories. Scenes of laughter within Ridge’s novel critique the violent humor of settler comedy like Harris’s that seeks to impose ahistorical narratives of white indigeneity on stolen land. Chapter 3 juxtaposes newspaper reports of Paiute advocate Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s and Mark Twain’s humorous lectures. Hopkins’s physical comedy aims to generate new political futures for the Paiutes by building bridges with white audiences while Twain’s humor erases Native presence at home even as it criticizes U.S. imperialism abroad. Chapter 4 compares Muscogee poet Alexander Posey’s satirical Fus Fixico Letters with selections from Black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar’s dialect poetry. For both of these writers, humor critiques the white gaze and also turns inward to privilege and honor domestic joy.