Monday, 18th November 2024, 5:30 CET
At this PoSoCoMeS seminar, Neringa Klumbytė discusses her book entitled “Authoritarian Laughter. Political Humor and Soviet Dystopia in Lithuania” (Cornell University Press, 2023) with Julie Hemment and Jogilė Ulinskaitė.
About the book
Authoritarian Laughter explores the political history of the satire and humor magazine Broom published in Soviet Lithuania. Artists, writers, and journalists were required to create state-sponsored Soviet humor and serve the Communist Party after Lithuania was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940. Neringa Klumbytė investigates official attempts to shape citizens into Soviet subjects and engage them through a culture of popular humor.
Broom was multidirectional—it both facilitated Communist Party agendas and expressed opposition toward the Soviet regime. Official satire and humor in Soviet Lithuania increasingly created dystopian visions of Soviet modernity and were a forum for critical ideas and nationalist sentiments that were mobilized in anti-Soviet revolutionary laughter in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Authoritarian Laughter illustrates that Soviet Western peripheries were unstable and their governance was limited. While authoritarian states engage in a statecraft of the everyday and seek to engineer intimate lives, authoritarianism is defied not only in revolutions, but in the many stories people tell each other about themselves in jokes, cartoons, and satires.
Author
Neringa Klumbytė is Professor of Anthropology and Russian and Post-Soviet Studies and Director of the Lithuania Program at the Havighurst Center for East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, Miami University. She is the author of Authoritarian Laughter: Political Humor and Soviet Dystopia in Lithuania (Cornell UP, 2022), the winner of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies Women’s Forum prize; a co-author of Social and Historical Justice in Multiethnic Lithuania (2018), and co-editor of Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964–85 (2012). Her recent research has focused on state violence and political participation in totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, Holocaust and genocide, sovereignty, human rights, and historical justice.
Discussants
Julie Hemment is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is an anthropologist and ethnographer who works in postsocialist Russia, research interests including gender, youth and civil society and feminist, participatory and collaborative methodologies. Her two books – Empowering Women in Russia: Aid, NGOs and Activism (2007) and Youth Politics in Putin’s Russia: Producing Patriots and Entrepreneurs (2015) – result from the ethnographic projects she’s enacted in collaboration with Russian feminist scholar-activists. Her most recent research and writing projects explore the topic of US-Russian political communication and Russian state actors’ embrace of humor as a political technology.
Jogilė Ulinskaitė is Associate Professor at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University. She holds a PhD in political science. Her research focused on the populist conception of political representation in Lithuania. Since then, she has been studying the collective memory of the communist and post-communist past in Lithuania and its use in political discourse. As Joseph P. Kazickas Associate Research Scholar in the Baltic Studies Program at Yale University in 2022, she focused on reconstructing emotional narratives of post-communist transformation from oral history interviews. Her current research integrates memory studies, narrative analysis and the sociology of emotions to analyse memory of post-communist transformation.
