Agency in a quake in time: a study of jokes about the future among Pakistani migrant youth

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores agency through humour and time amongst a group of Pakistani young men who reside, or recently resided, in a refugee shelter for unaccompanied minors in Athens, Greece. It asks how their jokes about alternate futures might challenge the slow, structural violence which places these young men on the margins of society in terms of work, space, and temporality. Despite a lack of anthropological work on humour, particularly amongst migrant communities, this article takes up humour as an analytical tool due to its pervasive presence in the shelter and its challenge to the discourse of victimhood of migrant children. I ultimately argue that conventional theories about the role of humour fail to fully account for the temporalities that these jokes around futurity evoke. This article also sheds light on the various constructs of time at play within the lives of these young men and how these are disrupted in the moment of the joke. It asks what modalities of agency emerge during these jokes when we employ Deleuze’s non-linear syntheses of time and seeks, ultimately, to look beyond conventional assumptions of youth agency and structural inequality, and to question the premises upon which such conventions are built.