From Invisibility to Ethnic Humor on Social Networks: The Long Emancipation of the Portuguese in France

Abstract

Humor is one of the discursive strategies mobilized by diasporas to face social stigma. The emancipatory process of these populations occurs however, over decades, in stages whose narratives vary according to the contexts. Since their massive arrival in France in the 1960s and 1970s, the Portuguese have almost always excelled at invisibility in the public spheres of the two countries. Considering these representations, we analyze the successive performances of the second and third generations in the deconstruction of stereotypes and/or in the readjustment of asymmetric positions, within the context of social (1980s) and associative movements (1990s), blogs (2000s), and ethnic humor videos on YouTube (2010s).