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Paper short abstract:

Within post-apartheid South Africa, vernacular comedy could be interpreted as an activist slant against the pervasiveness of English. This paper deploys Jacques Rancière's notion of "the partition of the sensible" in studying this usurpation of dominant comedy spaces by vernac variants.

Paper long abstract:

In South Africa, up to 80% of the population speaks an African language (or some combination of the 9 indigenous ones) as their mother tongue, yet in practice, English still dominates in politics, commerce, education, mainstream media and sadly, stand-up comedy. African languages thus remain disempowered. Recently, however, live comedy has seen the increased presence of native language(s) routines - among them, Mashabela Galane and Noko Moswete who crack jokes in Pedi, and Sifiso Nene and Siya Seya who perform in Zulu and Xhosa, respectively. In light of the linguistic disparity in post-apartheid South Africa, vernac comedy could be interpreted as a type of performative resistance against the pervasiveness of English.

This essay deploys Jacques Rancière's notion of "the partition of the sensible" to interrogate such resistance as a form of radical emancipatory politics, which he calls "dissensus". Premised on the idea that the social-sensible world is (unequally) "partitioned" by lines of inclusion and exclusion, subordination and elevation, politics for Rancière is predicated on a given text's ability to reconfigure such hierarchical relations.

By way of interpretive textual/audio-visual image-sequence analysis of the mentioned comedians' performances in terms of a poststructuralist sign-oriented semiotic approach, I consider ways in which the usurpation of dominant comedy spaces by vernac variants, which alters what/who can be seen/heard, and further calls into question the distribution of roles and languages, could be understood as a manifestation of 'aesthetic dissensus'.