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'No Laughing Matter: Race Joking and Resistance in Brazilian Social Media' examines the social phenomenon of construction and dissemination of colonial-like racist discourses fostered against upwardly-mobile black women through disparagement humour on social media platforms, adopting a fresh and innovative perspective. In this book, Luiz Vale¿rio P. Trindade explores the idea that disparagement humour might not be as exempt of social impact as the jokers might believe, and that, in fact, this kind of humour reveals the hidden facet of deep-seated colonial ideologies still present in Brazilian society despite being hailed as a unique model of a post-racial society.
The author argues that these ideologies establish and naturalise superior social positions and symbolic privileges to whites while undermining and delegitimising black women's upward social mobility. Social media platforms enable the proponents of these beliefs not only to engage in the practice of online hate speech but also to attract a considerable number of like-minded people, creating a long-lasting echo chamber effect in the cyberspace. This way, they manage to amplify the reach and reverberation of their racist discourses in the online environment in ways not commonly seen in Brazilian offline social contexts.
This monograph is of great interest and relevance to students, scholars, and researchers across a variety of disciplines, most notably Critical Race Studies, Media Communication Studies and Critical Humour Studies, and also academics in other areas such as Critical Discourse Analysis, Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies and Latin American Studies.
About the author
Luiz Valério P. Trindade holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Southampton (UK) and is currently an affiliated social scientist at IPIE - International Panel on the Information Environment (Switzerland). He is the recipient of the 'Doctoral College Research Award 2020' for a distinguished scholarly paper and the 'Award of Merit' granted in 2020 by Social Science Space (USA) in recognition of the impact of his research. His latest publications include 'Discurso de Ódio nas Redes Sociais' (Editora Jandaíra, 2022) and 'No Laughing Matter: Race Joking and Resistance in Brazilian Social Media' (Vernon Press, 2020), which was among the nominated titles for the '2020 British Sociological Association's Philip Abrams Memorial Prize'. His work has also been featured in dozens of newspaper articles, TV appearances, podcast interviews and scholarly journals.
