Zagarell's courses include American Literature at the Turn of the 20th Century and American Women Writers, 1820-1930. Johns and Needham are also expanding their teaching repertoires. She's also developing an intermediate-level course tentatively titled Ethnic and Racial Identity through Modes of American Humor. Early on, American-studies scholars were studying frontier humor as the American vernacular, the imagination that made American culture different from British culture. But African-American humor plays into this too.
People tend to have 'common-sense assumptions' about racial identity and characteristics.
What makes racial humor interesting is that the jokes tend to work on these incongruities and bring what seem like common-sense notions into relief. By pointing out these stereotypes, the humorists show us that our assumptions aren't necessarily correct. It was done in the context of Britain. But in one of my courses, Western Representations of the Colonized Subjects, I teach the classic texts of Empire. A slightly different version of this article is a continuation of the cover story of the September 2000 issue of the News of the Century, Oberlin's campaign newsletter.