Performingextracomunitari: Mocking migrants in Venetobarzellette

Abstract

In Italy, barzellette are short funny stories that speakers perform in various social events with large groups of friends, relatives, or colleagues. In Northern Italy, where a strong anti-immigration platform has been implemented by two influential political parties of the Veneto region, barzellette are performed to represent certain immigrant groups, especially the so-called extracomunitari. In this article, I examine the performative power of multidialectal language play in race-based humor through an analysis of two such joking events. I show how Veneto speakers perform barzellette in their local language, Veneto dialect, to mock immigrant voices, using approaches that purport, not necessarily in a deliberate fashion, to ‘contain’ or ‘conceal’ their racist remarks in their local code. In this way, they sharpen an exclusionary divide between an ‘us’, as insiders, as the local speakers of this language, and a ‘them’, as outsiders, or the immigrant ‘others’, who do not share this code. I thus examine issues of covert racist discourse within an ‘unmarked’ framework in which race and racializing discourses are embedded in social and cultural patterns. (Code-shifting, jokes, Lega Nord, migration, race, racialized discourse, Veneto dialect)*

Exclusionary intimacies: Racialized language in Veneto, Northern Italy

“…16 In recent years, however, barzellette have frequently centered on sexual and political themes and they often feature regional stereotyped figures such as Southern and Northern Italians and migrant groups, especially Muslims from sub-Saharan Africa, Northern Africa, and South Asia. During my fieldwork in Northern Italy, I noted how these jokes were at times performed to exclude certain migrant groups while creating intimacies for the local Italian participants (Perrino, 2015). I collected barzellette (and other types of jokes) both from different age sets and a wide range of events: during dinners (which bear some similarities to stand-up comedy formats [Glick, 2007]), during folkloristic events in towns, such as sagre, or 'local festivals', during conversations with doctors and nurses, and during political speeches or rallies delivered live, on television, and on the internet.…”

“…In my data, I explored how individuals supporting the Lega Nord/Liga Veneta Repubblica perform barzellette with frequent shifts from Standard Italian into Venetan as they enact and mock migrants' voices. In this light, multilanguage joke-telling is not only a resource for expressing "tacit racism" (Hill, 1995(Hill, , 2008, but also for positioning audiences who are its hearers (Perrino, 2015). By mocking migrants in Venetan, for example, Veneto speakers iconically model the jokes' 'concealment' or 'containment'das if limiting their jokes' accessibility and potential offensiveness to an imagined audience of Italian-speaking migrants by choosing Venetan over Standard Italian.…”

“…While barzellette in the Veneto region can be delivered in Standard Italian, many speakers use Venetan as a resource for humor. In this way, the barzelletta has two functions: first, it is addressed to audiences who are presumed to "share" this code, Venetan; second, when the objects of humor are migrants, such shifts enact the latter's exclusion (Perrino, 2015), thus creating a participation framework in which speakers engage in exclusionary intimacies. The barzelletta I analyze next is a clear example of how exclusionary intimacies can be created, enacted, and sustained during joke-telling events.…”

“…This barzelletta was video-recorded after a dinner in the small town of Noale, a few miles away from Venice, in the Veneto region, and it became a very popular joke over the internet after a dinner participant posted it on YouTube in October 2015. 17 14 In Italian, there are at least three terms that could be glossed with the English term 'joke': scherzo is the general term for joke, in the sense of 'prank' or 'trick'; barzelletta is a short funny story performed by barzellette teller or ordinary speakers; battuta is a short joking and unexpected response on some conversational topic (Perrino, 2015). 15 In Standard Italian, barzelletta is the feminine singular form, while barzellette is feminine plural form.…”

“…Drawing on Jaffe and Walton's (2011) recent work on stance in the blogosphere as a way to unveil unspoken stereotypes about race and class through the use of humor, this article looks at various offline sites in which racializing remarks help include, totally or partially, speech participants. Through the stance that certain blog commenters take while using humor, for example, Walton and Jaffe unveil patterns of "tacit racism" (Hill, 1995(Hill, , 2008Perrino, 2015) and classism (Jaffe and Walton, 2011: 204). In a similar vein, I examine how racialized remarks made by Northern Italians are discursively performed in ways that can enact migrants' exclusions at times, while creating more intimate spaces with other speech participants.…”