Race Comedy and the “Misembodied” Voice

Abstract

This essay unpacks the ways in which our “knowledge” of race and ethnicity is tied to ocularcentrism. It explores the political possibilities of ethnolinguistic imitation or “style-shifting” as part of an antiracist pedagogy embedded within popular culture. If identity is performed across different contexts, we may find an interesting dialogue of race and ethnicity within stand-up comedy, a realm of popular culture sometimes dismissed as “light entertainment.” The comedy of Russell Peters and Margaret Cho offer a site of imitation and ambivalence enabled by delinquent ethnic voices that play with the boundaries between self and Other.

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