Make Laughter, Not War: Caricature, Emotion, and Politics in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Era

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

From the porcelain busts of the Kukryniksy from the 1930s to the political jokes and memes about Russia’s ongoing invasion in Ukraine, this panel studies diverse forms of political caricature to critically reexamine the role of laughter in visual culture. Laughter has long been seen as a liberatory act, yet recent scholarship has challenged the assumption that it is necessarily subversive by identifying its imbrication with violence, power, and control. We ask: How do the dreams and realities of revolutionary laughter look from a decolonial perspective? What is the role of laughter in times of war, aggression, and conflict among Soviet, Soviet-allied, and post-Soviet states? With a wide geographic focus spanning from North Korea to Hungary, the panel brings together various disciplinary methods to analyze how visual satire and caricature produces and organizes emotion at times of political crisis.

Sub Unit

• Arts I: Visual Culture, Material Culture, Applied and Fine Arts

Chair

• Samuel Johnson, Syracuse U

Papers

• Tough Love: Caricature Amidst a Troubled Friendship between Hungary and North Korea circa 1956 - Douglas Gabriel, U of Florida; Adrienn Kácsor, Bauhaus U, Weimar (Germany)

• Among Friends: The Kukryniksy and the Comic Portrait Bust - Samuel Johnson, Syracuse U

• Ideology versus Quasi-Ideology: 'Rashism' and 'Ukrofascism' in World, Ukrainian, and Russian Political Cartoons and Memes - Orest Semotiuk, Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland)

Discussant

• Jindrich Toman, U of Michigan