{"title":"Laughing at Empire","description":"Postcolonial satire and cultural humor as resistance. Stories that mock military dictators, colonial hangovers, and the absurdity of occupation — comedy forged under empire's thumb.","products":[{"product_id":"my-uncle-napoleon","title":"My Uncle Napoleon","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eDear Uncle Napoleon is convinced that everything bad that has ever happened to him — and everything bad that will happen — is the result of British conspiracy. His extended family thinks he's delusional. He may not be entirely wrong. Pezeshkzad's 1973 novel became the most beloved Iranian novel of the 20th century — a satire of a specific kind of Iranian paranoia that has its roots in actual British interference in Iranian affairs. Hilarious, sharp, and more politically accurate than it pretends to be.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45646107246790,"sku":null,"price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/my-uncle-napolean.jpg?v=1774245366"},{"product_id":"xala","title":"Xala","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eEl Hadji Abdou Kader Beye joins the Senegalese bourgeoisie on the day of independence and immediately takes a third wife as a symbol of his new status. That night he discovers he has xala — the curse of sexual impotence. The cure he seeks becomes a journey through the corruption and self-deception of the post-independence African elite. Sembène made this into a film too — both are essential. The funniest and most savage dispatch from inside the class of Africans who replaced the colonizers and reproduced their worst habits.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45647321170118,"sku":null,"price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/xala.webp?v=1774301650"},{"product_id":"the-master-and-margarita","title":"The Master and Margarita","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eThe devil arrives in Stalin's Moscow with a retinue of bizarre companions and exposes Soviet society's greed, cowardice, and bureaucratic absurdity through a series of increasingly chaotic encounters. Woven through it is a parallel narrative about Pontius Pilate and Jesus. Bulgakov wrote this knowing it would never be published in his lifetime — his wife hid the manuscript. It finally appeared in 1966, twenty-six years after his death. The most joyful and devastating Russian dispatch ever written. The laugh that survived everything the 20th century threw at it.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45660627009734,"sku":null,"price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/the-master-and-the-margarita.webp?v=1774799285"},{"product_id":"a-case-of-exploding-mangoes","title":"A Case of Exploding Mangoes","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003ePakistan, 1988. General Zia ul-Haq's plane explodes shortly after takeoff, killing everyone aboard including the US Ambassador. Hanif writes a dark comedy of competing assassination plots — the CIA, Inter-Services Intelligence, a junior air force officer, a crow, possibly the mangoes — that converges on that explosion. He treats Pakistan's most beloved military dictator with a savage irreverence that would have been dangerous to publish in Pakistan, and uses the farce to dispatch from inside Pakistan's relationship with its own military history: the coups, the executions, the American money, the permanent state within the state. The funniest political novel on this shelf.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45664744931526,"sku":null,"price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/a-case-of-exploding-mangoes.webp?v=1774933570"},{"product_id":"candide","title":"Candide","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eVoltaire sent his naive hero Candide through war, earthquake, the Inquisition, slavery, and massacre — and gave him a tutor who keeps insisting, through all of it, that this is the best of all possible worlds. Published in 1759 and banned immediately by the Geneva city council, the book is a direct attack on the philosophical position that suffering is part of a divine plan and therefore acceptable. The form is the weapon: Voltaire adopts the cheerful optimism he is destroying and follows it to its logical conclusion until it collapses under the weight of the bodies. The foundational text of political satire in prose fiction — the ancestor of everything from A Modest Proposal to Cat's Cradle to Look Who's Back on this shelf. Everything that came after it in the satirical tradition owes it a debt.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45827925770438,"sku":null,"price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/candide.webp?v=1778190761"},{"product_id":"the-good-soldier-svejk","title":"The Good Soldier Švejk","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eŠvejk is a Czech dog trader conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army during WWI who navigates the entire military bureaucracy through cheerful compliance and spectacular incompetence that may or may not be deliberate. He does exactly what he's told. He follows every order to its logical conclusion. The results are catastrophic for the Austro-Hungarian war effort and entirely innocent on Švejk's part — or so he maintains. Hašek was a Czech anarchist who wrote this while dying of alcoholism, left it unfinished at his death in 1923, and produced the most important Czech novel ever written. The most sophisticated expression in literature of resistance through strategic stupidity — the appearance of compliance as the most effective form of subversion. The essential companion to Revolution for the Hell of It: Hoffman disrupts with joy, Švejk disrupts with obedience.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45827929866438,"sku":null,"price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/the-good-soldier-svejk.jpg?v=1778191182"},{"product_id":"devil-on-the-cross","title":"Devil on the Cross","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eNgũgĩ wrote this novel in secret on toilet paper while imprisoned without charge by the Kenyan government in 1977-78 — and wrote it in Gĩkũyũ rather than English as a deliberate act of linguistic decolonization, insisting that African literature belonged to African languages rather than to the colonizer's tongue. The novel is a satirical feast: a competition of thieves and robbers arguing over who can best exploit the Kenyan people, rendered in the tradition of oral storytelling and biblical allegory. Banned in Kenya. The most formally radical African political novel and the one most completely written as a weapon — every formal choice, including the language itself, is an act of resistance. The essential African voice on the Laugh \u0026amp; Resist shelf and the proof that satire as a political weapon belongs to no single tradition.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45827975872710,"sku":null,"price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/devil-on-the-cross.jpg?v=1778193605"},{"product_id":"don-quixote","title":"Don Quixote","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eA man reads so many chivalric romances that he decides to become a knight. He names himself Don Quixote de la Mancha, recruits a bewildered neighbor as his squire, and rides out to do battle with the forces of evil — which turn out to be windmills, flocks of sheep, and a barber's basin he mistakes for a golden helmet. Cervantes published this in 1605 as a direct satire of the adventure story tradition that had convinced a generation of Spanish readers that knight errantry was a model for living — and produced the first modern novel and the most complete literary argument ever made that the stories we tell ourselves about the world are more dangerous than the world itself. Every satirist from Voltaire to Vonnegut to Snicket learned something from how this works. The foundational text of the entire Laugh \u0026amp; Resist shelf — the book that first understood that following a dangerous narrative to its logical conclusion is more devastating than arguing against it directly.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45836154929350,"sku":null,"price":29.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/don-quixote.jpg?v=1778603334"},{"product_id":"the-autumn-of-the-patriarch","title":"The Autumn of the Patriarch","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eA Caribbean dictator so ancient that nobody can remember a time before him rules over a country so completely that reality itself has bent to accommodate his power. The novel is narrated in a single sentence that runs for pages without a period — because a dictatorship doesn't pause, doesn't allow for breath, doesn't end until it ends. García Márquez uses the dictator novel form to make the definitive Latin American argument about how authoritarian power operates not just politically but epistemologically — how it rewrites history, bends reality, and makes the meaning of words themselves serve the regime. The most formally ambitious political novel in the Latin American tradition and the one that most precisely shows how power that has lasted long enough stops being a political condition and becomes the weather.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45836489130182,"sku":null,"price":17.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/the-autumn-of-the-patriarch.webp?v=1778626784"},{"product_id":"civilwarland-in-bad-decline","title":"CivilWarLand in Bad Decline","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eA theme park where Civil War reenactors keep getting shot by actual gangs. A corporate memo written in the language of empowerment while workers are destroyed by the system it describes. A haunted theme park. A futuristic advertising dystopia. Saunders's first collection of stories is set in a near-future America of corporate euphemism and spectacular moral failure — and the horror of it is that the language his characters use to describe their situation is recognizably the language of the actual present. The most precise satirist of late capitalism's language writing in America today: the gap between what corporations say and what they do is Saunders's entire subject, and he renders it with a black comedy that makes you laugh and then feel terrible about laughing, which is exactly the right response. The essential companion to Capitalist Realism — Fisher names the system, Saunders makes you feel its texture in your body.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45836491292870,"sku":null,"price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/civilwarland-in-bad-decline.webp?v=1778627132"},{"product_id":"america-the-book","title":"America (The Book)","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eA fake civics textbook that is also a real civics lesson. Stewart and the Daily Show writing staff dismantle the mythology of American democracy using the exact form they're parodying — complete with fake photographs, fake Supreme Court Justice centerfolds, fake exercises, fake teacher's editions — to make the argument that the official account of how American democracy works is itself a kind of satire. The joke is that the parody is more accurate than the original. Published in 2004 when The Daily Show was at its peak as a political institution — the moment when comedy news became the most trusted source of political information for a generation, which is either a triumph of satire or an indictment of journalism, and probably both. The most accessible introduction to American political satire as a genre and the most entertaining civics lesson available.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45836491948230,"sku":null,"price":19.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/america-the-book.jpg?v=1778627203"},{"product_id":"the-importance-of-being-earnest","title":"The Importance of Being Earnest","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eWilde wrote this in 1895 and it was being performed at the St. James's Theatre while he was simultaneously being prosecuted for gross indecency. Every joke about the performance of respectability, every line about the gap between public identity and private truth, every moment where a character maintains an elaborate fiction to survive polite society, was written by a man who knew exactly what maintaining an elaborate fiction to survive polite society cost. The play looks like a farce about two men who have invented alter egos to escape their social obligations. It is actually about the violence of a society that demands you perform a self you are not and the specific survival strategy of treating that demand so completely seriously that it collapses into comedy. Wilde was sentenced to two years hard labor for being gay. He died in exile three years after his release. Camp — the sensibility Susan Sontag named and that John Waters perfected — starts here: the refusal to take the serious seriously, the insistence on style as content, the understanding that the only honest response to a society organized around performance is to perform better and more obviously than anyone else. The most formally perfect comedy in the English language and the most punk biography on the comedy shelf after Lenny Bruce.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45867205427398,"sku":null,"price":13.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/the-importance-of-being-earnest.jpg?v=1779372340"}],"url":"https:\/\/punkandpedagogy.com\/collections\/laughing-at-empire.oembed","provider":"Punk and Pedagogy","version":"1.0","type":"link"}