Read it and Laugh: Humour and Mistake-Making in Green Grass, Running Water

Abstract

In this essay, Samantha Elmsley perceptively illustrates how laughter generates accountability for non-native readers approaching Thomas King‘s novel, Green Grass, Running Water through a settler-colonial critical framework.  She suggests that when characters make humourous mistakes in the text, it reveals the underlying tensions between native and European discourses.  Laughing at these mistakes can help non-native readers address their own complicity in settler-colonial/native power relations by acknowledging existing power structures, and, through laughter, undermining them.  Bringing together a Bakhtinian approach to laughter with a Foucauldian analysis of power relationships, Elmsley shows how humour “frees readers from habitual interpretations” in order to “question their own subjective standpoint,” and make space for alternative native subjectivities and epistemologies.   This essay won the 2013 Avie Bennett Prize for best undergraduate essay in Canadian literature.

Emily Ballantyne