Svetlana Alexievich

Skeletal humour
between binaries:
forfeiting the funny in Svetlana Alexievich’s Boys in Zinc

Emily Upson

Eva van Roekel, an anthropologist working within Latin America, spent several years in post-dictatorship Argentina. She examined how humour revealed “internalised ambiguities”, in “complex everyday moral confusions and moral uncertainties”.¹ This analysis was a steep departure from the often perfunctory assessment that humour entrenched social groups as certainties, rather than sensitively navigating social uncertainties. I want to take this perspective and apply it to Svetlana Alexievich’s text, Boys in Zinc, which is a collection […]