Laughing at the state: state violence and satirical acts of citizenship in the Afro-Brazilian diaspora

This article explores acts of humour that enact citizens as political subjects in the face of state violence and practices of controlled incorporation of racialised Afro-Brazilian others. To do this I analyse hitherto unstudied material from the online memes that followed the forced disappearance of Mr Amarildo de Souza by the ‘pacifying’ police in Rio de Janeiro. Doing this I show how multi-modal online memes that take an ironic stance towards state-violence can be understood as enacting a radical equality which subverts the state-sanctioned racialised and gendered distribution of unequal functions and places that serves to ‘pacify’ threatening racialised others. Thus, I argue that the act of joking is an act of citizenship because it presupposes equality while enacting an incongruity between this equality and the reality of racist state violence, and its ostensible purpose of ‘saving’ racialised victims. In this way ironic memes can provide an important contribution to theory of citizenship, which hitherto has not involved the study of humour as a political act. Thus, if the political nature of humour involves incongruity between conceptualisation and experience, abstract and sensory/objective, sanctity and profanity, dignity and baseness, acts that ironically enact these incongruities as existing in and between state-discourse and practice are deeply political acts and need to be studied as such.