Politics of literary humour and contested narrative identity (of a region with no identity)

Abstract

The paper concerns the reading of humour, literary imaginativeness, social structures, local identities, as well as their emancipation, and their interconnected nature. Humour is approached here as a tool through which the writer as well as the reader can self-consciously rise above the social and cultural discourses within which the text itself is written. These themes are discussed by investigating how literary humour is used in the process of narrativizing the marginalized histories and identities of the Tornedalen (Torne Valley) region of Sweden. The specific focus is on the humour of novelist Mikael Niemi, a native of the region, and his novel Popularmusik Från Vittula. The paper examines how Niemi’s literary humour is embedded in the questions of spatiality and otherness, and how they are both constructed and contested through irony directed at the common regional stereotypes of Tornedalen, a ‘region with no identity’. The key argument here concerns how perceiving the world through humour, and humour through social criticism, are alternative manners of acknowledging, understanding and interpreting the processes on-going in space and society.