In what ways is comedy subversive? This vital new book critically considers the importance of comedy in challenging and redefining our relations to race and racism through the lens of political correctness.īy viewing comedy as both a constitutive feature of social interaction and as a necessary requirement in the appraisal of what is often deemed to be ‘politically correct’, this book provides an innovative and multidisciplinary approach to the study of comedy and popular culture. Here, examples of ‘alterity’ are neither ‘new’ nor ‘contemporary’ but, instead, constitute a fundamental part of the nation’s history: of the ‘gap’ made visible in transiting past and present. Consequently, it is suggested that if the spontaneity of conviviality is to encourage openness, then, understandings of multiculturalism need to go beyond reification in order to challenge our understandings of the past. These differences should not be feared but, as a characteristic part of our convivial culture, should be supplemented with historical analyses that highlight but, also, undermine, the significance of cultural differences in the present. Notably, it is parallax which puts antagonism, strangeness and ambivalence at the heart of contemporary depictions of convivial Britain, with the UK’s cultural differences located in the ‘gaps’ and tensions which characterize both its past and present.

In particular, when used alongside Žižek’s notion of parallax, it is argued that understandings of convivial culture can be supported by a historical importance that deliberately ‘shocks’ and, subsequently dislodges, popular interpretations of the UK’s ‘white past’. Through examining the BBC television series, Black and British: A Forgotten History, written and presented by the historian David Olusoga, and in extending Paul Gilroy’s assertion that the everyday, banality of living with difference is now an ordinary part of British life, this article considers how Olusoga’s historicization of the black British experience reflects a convivial rendering of UK multiculture.

Black and british by david olusoga