The columnist as trickster: satire and subversion in literary journalism

Abstract

This project examines facets of racial identity as they emerge in a contemporary South African context, and considers how instances of local satire both subtly resist and support white normativity. It consists of two separate sections: firstly, a self-reflective essay that, employing current theories from the academic field of whiteness studies, assesses South African satire’s relation to and negotiation of race and identity politics; and secondly, The Weekly Crab, my own creative response to the genre of satire. Using contemporary theories of racial construction, the first section will delineate whiteness as a dominant but invisible identification, and as a social construction underpinned by an inherited and continually reproduced privilege. Satire, in turn, will be described as a mode of rhetorical and conceptual attack that is capable of cultivating an understanding of how whiteness functions as a cultural construct, as well as foster a sensitivity to how its cultural dynamics shape and inform racial politics in the South African context. The first section will identify the website Hayibo.com as a source of local satire whose satirising of current events is often complicit in the perpetuation of white normativity. I will point to moments in its work where white expectations, fears and social mores are left unexamined, and, indeed, become an unspoken part of their critiquing lens rather than the focus of it. An accompanying critical breakdown of my own satire in The Weekly Crab will show my work to be a countertext to Hayibo. As I will make clear, I am not saying that I successfully fill a gap in the landscape of South African satire. Instead, in comparing my work to the satire that Hayibo produces, and by providing, in the second section, a creative response to that particular approach to satire, I am trying to circumscribe a blind spot in South African literary journalism : that is, the paucity of satire that aggressively subverts the normativity of whiteness