Paper Short Abstract:

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 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.