Abstract
“Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood” is a bestselling memoir that was written by Trevor Noah, a South African-born comedian of global acclaim. In the book, Noah relives his upbringing in South Africa, when apartheid policies and legislation were designed and harshly implemented to keep the country’s citizens apart based on race and ethnicity. Yet, in relieving this oppressive and traumatic period and proceeding to the 1994 democratic era, Noah applies humor as a storytelling strategy to downplay this harsh period. Hence, this paper adopts the incongruity theory to present the juxtaposition that is evident in the form of surprises and tensions in the narrative, which the readers may find humorous. In addition, the paper draws on Apartheid Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as theoretical frameworks to conduct this qualitative study. CDA is used as a research tool to indicate how a text authored by a comedian from the global south is used to humorously resist political and social power relations. It is found that Noah manages to criticize the segregation that was there in a subtle manner and to educate the audience through humor about socio-economic challenges in the country. Even though his writing is mainly in a language of the global north for possible economic reasons, he draws from the languages of the global south to correctly represent the culture of the South African people he is part of.
Publisher
Center for Strategic Studies in Business and Finance SSBFNET
Subject
General Earth and Planetary Sciences,General Environmental Science
Reference36 articles.
1. Akdo?an, S. (2021). Remembering and writing the cycles of oppression and resistance in Ece Temelkuran’s The Time of Mute Swans, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 62:1, 57-68, https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2020.1772191
2. Akpome, A. (2017) Post-TRC anxieties in Jacob Dlamini's native nostalgia. English Academy Review. 1(34),36-51 https://doi.org/10.1080/10131752.2017.1333224
3. Baisley, M.C. & Grunberg, N.E. (2019). Bringing humor theory into practice: An interdisciplinary approach to online humor training. New Ideas in Psychology, 55, 24-34. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2019.04.006
4. Berenstain, N., Dotson, K., Paredes, J., Ruíz, E., & Silva, N. K. (2021). Epistemic oppression, resistance, and resurgence. Contemporary Political Theory, 1-32. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-021-00483-z
5. Birkisdóttir, V. L. (2018). The Impact of racial segregation in South Africa. Bachelor of Arts Sociology thesis, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Ísland: Svansprent. https://skemman.is/handle/1946/30075?locale=en