Paper short abstract:

The aim of this paper is to explore humor as a form of resistance but also to try to go beyond the oppositional power/resistance scheme.

Paper long abstract:

Based on fieldwork in a "Local de Retention" where aliens are detained before their deportation, this paper explores the role of humor in confinement places. First of all, I will examine the relevance of these matters, trying to understand why this kind of research informs the people's experiences and power relationships in confinement place.

I would like to raise here a set of related questions: what do people laugh for? Why do aliens laugh in retention? To laugh when the situation is not amusing can be perceived as a way of making acceptable the deportation threat, which is lived as unfair and perceived as an injustice. But laugh can also be perceived as a way of subverting the repressive context. I will analyze how humor can be considered as a "weapon of the weak" which permits to impose another perspective and to reverse, at least in a symbolic way, the power games of the retention center. Eventually I would make the hypothesis that humor may be considered an expression (among others) of contributing to political consciousness.