A Laughable Empire - Todd Nathan Thompson

In The Nineteenth-century United States, Jokes, Comic Anecdotes, And Bons Mots About The Pacific Islands And Pacific Islanders Tried To Make The Faraway And Unfamiliar Either Understandable Or Completely Incomprehensible (i.e., Other ) To American Readers. A Laughable Empire Examines This Substantial Archival Corpus, Attempting To Make Sense Of Nineteenth-century American Humor About Hawai'i And The Rest Of The Pacific World.todd Nathan Thompson Collects And Interprets These Comic, Sometimes Racist Depictions Of Pacific Culture In Nineteenth-century American Print Culture. Drawing On An Archive Of Almanac And Periodical Humor, Sea Yarns, Jest Books, And Literary Comedy, Thompson Demonstrates How Jokes And Humor Functioned Sometimes In The Service Of And Sometimes In Resistance To Us Imperial Ambitions.