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Paper Short Abstract:

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 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.