In 1956 the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party resurrected The Broom, the Soviet Lithuanian humor and satire journal. Like other Soviet humor journals it was to be a platform of building communism and fighting its enemies. But soon it became a cradle of a new covert national culture defined by modernist aesthetics and political opposition. The talk will explore how this covert sphere emerged through secrecy and laughter among artists, censors, and readers. Klumbyte will argue that through covert laughter at the Soviet state and socialist everyday life, the participants created ironic forms of Soviet citizenship grounded in utopias of anti-Soviet sovereignty.

Neringa Klumbyte is associate professor of anthropology at Miami University, Ohio. A political and economic anthropologist working in Lithuania, the European Union, and Eurasia more broadly, her interests include everyday life in post-socialist and post-colonialist countries, states and nationalism, elections, the anthropology of food, marketing and consumption, ethnographic writing and representations. Her articles have appeared in American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Slavic Review, East European Politics and Societies, and other journals. She co-edited Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964-85 (with Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, 2012). In 2015, she received the Miami University College of Arts and Science Distinguished Educator Award.