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Paper short abstract:

This article explores how ideologically divergent digital media operators such as Italian populist leaders and African-Italian YouTubers co-participate in ironic performances eliciting diverse forms of displaced alterity, ranging from xenophobic imaginaries to powerful modes of resistance to them.

Paper long abstract:

Alongside the highly mediatized life of recent Italian politics, anti-immigration populism as a mode of social expression has permeated Italian public discourse since the mid-1990s. This trend has become even more apparent in the aftermath of the so-called Mediterranean refugee crisis in the 2010s. Since then, the Italian popular classes’ increasing engagement with online social media has contributed to the electoral success of digitally active anti-immigration leaders and Facebook celebrities like Lega Nord party secretary Matteo Salvini. Simultaneously, controversial Black Italian YouTubers and former African migrants like the pop-music artist Bello FiGo have also found commercial success, due to their ironic (if not explicitly parodistic) engagement with Italian mainstream populist discourses and immigration policies. This article explores how ideologically divergent digital media operators such as Salvini and Bello FiGo end up co-participating in ironic media performances of anti-refugee discourses that make possible different modes of displaced alterity, ranging from the cultural reproduction of anti-immigration imaginaries up to the instantiation of powerful modalities of grassroots resistance to them. As we will demonstrate ethnographically, these performances allow for forms of cultural intimacy between these media operators and their publics by means of populist irony, while engendering opposite (though structurally similar) dynamics of illiberal ventriloquism. In doing so, these controversial, future-oriented performances tend to subvert institutionalized liberal narratives of crisis and systemic displacement by putting into question the various internal inconsistencies characterizing contemporary neoliberal Italian immigration policies.

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Mexico’s urban indigenous populations are often migrants who travel back and forth to/from their hometowns. My project seeks to give indigenous youth a platform to express a decolonial political humour through which they can make sense of, and shed public light on, their difficulties.

Paper long abstract:

Most of Mexico’s large urban areas host considerable populations of indigenous peoples from elsewhere in the country. And although internal rural-urban migration has been a characteristic of Mexico, its indigenous iteration is more circular because some communities rely on members taking charge of certain roles for a time. Ironically, now that the federal government has announced more support for indigenous peoples, such help is usually earmarked for the original rural communities. This excludes thousands who already live in or are planning to move to cities. But even with odds against them, many indigenous youth have finished university studies and now have professional jobs. Some of these highly educated individuals seek to use their acquired skills and networks to help new indigenous migrants navigate the urban world. With my project, I aim at providing a platform for indigenous youth to express their ideas and experiences on racism and discrimination through humour. This has two purposes: to help new indigenous migrants understand what awaits them in cities and how to deal with it; and to share their experience with the wider urban populations. My hope is that the collected pieces worked by indigenous youth in workshops and meetings, and published in social media by some of them, provide not only an unprecedented use of vernacular humour to deal with painful realities, but does so trying to avoid colonial categories (classism and racism). This project is therefore an experiment, trying to tease out a decolonial political humour from an indigenous perspective.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to explore how immigrant stand-up comedians claim visibility and carve themselves alternative spaces on Istanbul's stages, where comedy becomes an important aspect of signaling inclusion/exclusion and marking group identities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to explore how stand-up comedians claim visibility and carve themselves alternative spaces on stages in the highly censored public space of Istanbul and within the broader political context of Turkey’s authoritarian rule. Comedians on these stages hail predominantly from underrepresented communities, a considerable percentage of whom are immigrants. This project focuses on the entitlement that makes an identity joke possible; the punitive/legal, social, and professional consequences of these jokes; and the boundary-crossing/boundary-making practices of stand-up comedy. While comedians are trying to resist systematic silencing and assimilation by subverting pejorative jokes of othering and turning them into “jokes of identity”, the realm of comedy complicates the power relations between Istanbul’s comedians and their audience members, who are also from diverse backgrounds. Immigrant comedians have to navigate through changing frames of references since a joke depends heavily on shared knowledge and doing comedy requires a special familiarity and nuanced linguistic/cultural skills. Comedy, in this sense, becomes an important aspect of signaling inclusion/exclusion and marking group identities. Although immigrant comedians are heavily burdened with proving themselves to be funny within new frames of reference; local comedians are also haunted by the question of migration, contemplating on the possibility of migrating while touring Europe and performing their shows to the Turkish diaspora in Europe. Eventually the question of “what if I’m not funny there?” demands a more nuanced discussion of migration, citizenship, claiming authority over identity representation, and belonging on both sides.

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Paper short abstract:

A conversation between Appiah and Bhabha published in 2018 elucidates why people from all over the world meet in Berlin’s anglophone comedy clubs: they laugh at ethnic stereotypes performed on stage and practice what the doyens of post-colonial thinking refer to as cosmopolitan vernacular.

Paper long abstract:

Appiah and Bhabha discuss the political situation since 2017, because Trump, Brexit and

restrictive immigration policies have challenged the concepts of cosmopolitanism they put

forward. Appiah observes that the problem of how to live together in a globalised world is not

solved by platinum frequent flyers, cosmopolitans who never converge with anything. Bhabha

draws attention to migrants who have developed a cosmopolitan vernacular − a

cosmopolitanism more of necessity than of luxury – more apt to confront the challenges imposed

by globalisation.

The owners of Berlin’s anglophone stand-up comedy clubs, the hosts, most comedians and

members of the audience are migrants. I arrived at the venues as a platinum cosmopolitan, and

it took me a while to comprehend the practices of vernacular cosmopolitanism in these clubs. My

view on ethnicity was forged by discourse analytical concepts of social constructivism and the

reference to ethnic stereotypes on stage was unbearable for me. One might consider jokes on

the length of Asian, African and European penises racist, and I often thought of leaving a show − I

stayed because paradoxically I felt comfortable in these clubs: I simply enjoyed having a beer

there; it was cosy and very easy to get in touch with other people.

My aim is to show that it is not enough to analyse jokes to understand why Berlin’s

comedy clubs attract people from all over the world. It is necessary to converge with the whole

setting and its corresponding practices to explain what happens when they meet.

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This paper portrays female refugees from Syria who became stand-up Comedians in their new homes not only because they are funny but also to stand up against multiple forms of discrimination and patriarchal norms.

Paper long abstract:

Telling my story through comedy is my way of achieving visibility for myself and millions of other women who lived similar lives as me always thinking the belong below everyone in the chain of being seen. I was never praised or celebrated for my achievements simply because I was just a girl! So now I take space, I’m visible and I’m me (FLONA 2023).

Refugee women from Syria are mostly depicted as women without a voice, following a man, as someone invisible. They are portrayed as sad victims and that leads to an understanding of the migration process and its (female) protagonists as humourless with the broader implications for the types of knowledge that we (re)produce around migrants’ experiences, subjectivities, and struggles (Franck 2022).

In a joint project from the Austrian Red Cross (crosstalk: talking with, not about refugees) and the Political Correct Comedy Club (a queer, feminist Comedy Club in Vienna) we observed, listened to, and spoke with five female comedians from Syria who fled the war and took the stage in order to lough about their stories, their past, present and future and by doing so found home and relieve in humour. Their taking of space is to lough in the face of power. Their laughter and their comedy are to say patriarchy and discrimination(s) have no power over them. It is to refuse that power authorizing force (Bhungalia 2020). Humour in their refugee experience helps to process tragedies and traumata, loss, and hopelessness (Van Ramshorst 2019).

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The paper reflects on the use of (self)mockery as resistance in the video production of new Italians on TikTok focusing on two plots: Expectations vs. reality of the migration and migrants’ lives in Italy; Video calls obligations to relatives.

Paper long abstract:

The New Italians’ voice in the public debate has sometimes emerged within some significant arenas of the national popular culture. Despite the high success of some singers or dancers, their celebrity does not seem to reshape the so-called ‘second generation' social representation. The increase of the social media TikTok, mainly used by teenagers, seems to have provided a social arena capable of reconfiguring 'from below' the representations of migrants and young people who come from migration (Bachis 2023).

Drawing from a digital ethnography on New Italians on TikTok, the paper analyses two specific video meme patterns and their diffusion among New Italians: 1. Expectations vs. reality of the migration and migrants’ lives in Italy; 2. Video calls obligations to relatives.

Broadly speaking, mockery and jokes characterize a great part of the contents of TikTok. Yet, the (self)mockery created by young migrants seems to represent a significant fortunate case. This is true also for the world's TikTok celebrity Khaby Lame - who was born in Dakar and grew up in Piedmont. The paper reflects on the use of (self)mockery as a form of resistance against the negative representation of migrants and the widespread vision of migration as a problem.

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This paper explores the prominence of laughter in a Greek NGO supporting youth who have travelled across illegalised borders. Analysing the way laughter erupted or gradually bubbled up in time, I argue for shared laughter as a potential practice of defiant care amidst wider temporal violence.

Paper long abstract:

This paper asks what we can learn from the laughter heard, experienced and shared in a Greek NGO supporting youth who have travelled across illegalised borders. Why was laughter so prominent ethnographically in a setting where one might expect stories of pain, suffering and violence? Whilst literature on youth has often highlighted the role of jokes and fun (Dyson 2014; Krishnan 2015) and Goldstein (2003) has explored laughter in the marginalized space of a Brazilian favela, my work draws on temporality as an analytic to offer a counterpoint to conventional structural-functional theories of humour. Following nine months of fieldwork in an NGO in Athens, Greece, and a further nine months of 'hanging out' with interlocutors from the intended beneficiary demographic, I analyse the way laughter erupted or gradually bubbled up in time ethnographically as well as the timespaces within and outside the NGO where laughter was unlikely or absent. Considering that certain sorts of laughter emerged from the exercise of temporal agency, I argue for shared laughter as a practice of defiant care across linguistic barriers and as resistance against wider temporal violence or chronocracy (Kirtsoglou & Simpson 2021). As well as challenging victimising discourses in migration in this paper, I also want to question the wider anthropological neglect of humour and laughter in research, despite its ubiquitous presence in the everyday for so many of us.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how we can take care of emic and etic concepts in migration research by looking closely at the practice of joking.

Paper long abstract:

The recent debate on how to deal with concepts that become increasingly entangled in highly politicized narratives has spurred a call for separating emic and etic concepts in migration research (Anderson 2019; Dahinden 2016; Rytter 2019). In following this call, I argue that emic and etic categories and concepts also produce each other through how they become entangled in socio-political processes. In the paper, I introduce these conflated categories and concepts as awkward notions due to how both categories and concepts have become ideas, opinions, and presumptions that often cause unease when discussed and managed. Building on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork amongst employees at a DIY store in Sweden, this paper explores how we can take care of such awkward notions by looking closely at the practice of joking. Joking does political work and while joking can be grounds for conviviality it can also be a foundation for contentions (Franck 2022; Trnka 2019). In the store, the employees made use of jokes, jibes, put-down comments, and ridicule to overcome sensitive and sometimes uncomfortable subjects and differences, and to confront a political order. Among the employees, joking is a practice that takes care of relationships when the jokes become ways of testing boundaries that may or may not be transgressed. Signs of affection, in terms of being able to joke about each other’s attributes and showing love through names of endearment, illustrate how joking "with heart" becomes an important aspect of convivial socialites that mediate awkward notions.

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This paper brings together examples from research with West African refugees in Italy and Latinx youth in the US South, reflecting on the role of humor and play as tactics to subvert hegemonic narratives and shift the grounds of one own's existence away from victimization and racialized exclusion.

Paper long abstract:

This paper brings together examples from my ethnographic research with West African refugees in Italy and Latinx youth in the US South to reflect on humor as a tactic to subvert and transfigure experiences of racialized exclusion. In the US, media and political narratives have cast undocumented underage migrants either as powerless victims or as problematic youth undeserving of a path to citizenship (Heidbrink 2020). In Europe, asylum systems and humanitarian discourses strip asylum seekers of their agency and humanity by caging their whole existence within the narrow confines of the un/deserving refugee label (Ticktin 2016). My interlocutors in Italy were exposed to these discourses through a genre of everyday talk -- the "why did you come here" narrative -- that framed their presence in a small mountain town as odd at best, rendering them alien to a place where they had been living for years. This narrative entered our conversations as a hidden transcript (Scott 1990) made of inside jokes through which the men recast themselves as local, shifting the grounds of their interactions with “natives” like myself away from unequal relationships of pity and hospitality. As I show in my second example, Latinx youth in Atlanta, USA, similarly used mockery and play to “refigure the terms of their existence” during the tense and traumatic times of Trump’s 2016 US Presidential Campaign (Carillo 2016, 190). I conclude by reflecting on how these humorous practices contribute to the undoing of hegemonic discourses and remaking of collective worlds and identities.

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This presentation considers tourist sites between Senegal and Italy as spaces of agency construction through humor for African migrants.By looking at slogans on motto t-shirts and souvenirs, I discuss how playful language and mockery are used to reclaim language and counter racism and victimization.

Paper long abstract:

Motto t-shirts and souvenirs with printed statements are an integral element of tourism. Often, they are regarded as tacky or even tasteless material, which is made for quick consumption and soon to be thrown away after the holiday. At the same time, mass tourist sites offer migrants income possibilities of several kinds without formal documentation, ranging from work in a restaurant to beach vending or sex work. Some of them stay only for one season to earn the money they need to continue their mobility, others stay for many years. The working conditions are often harsh, as the work is usually informal and highly competitive. Many of the migrants live in precarious conditions and are exposed to police raids and verbal violence by the tourists, often on racist grounds. In some cases, this verbal abuse is even turned into a consumable part of the tourist experience. Masqueraded as humorous play through their joking manner, racist slogans are printed on mass-produced souvenir t-shirts or are featured in songs that are played within the tourist area. But instead of passively persisting, many migrants actively appropriate the means of language on objects to invert the mockery. In this presentation, I present material from research on Senegalese migration to Europe which focuses on tourist sites. By discussing how migrants ridicule the tourist’s bad behavior through humorous language in speech and on objects, the established perspective on victimized migrants shall be flipped into a more holistic understanding of migrant agency construction in globalized encounters.