Paper short abstract:

This paper examines Elvin Mensah's London streets and trains performances, portraying them as reiterations of diaspora presences in the colonial homeland, and their online exhibition, as a way of circumventing traditional gate-keeping structures that vet minority expressions for publics

Paper long abstract:

Historically, relations between Europe and Africa have been disproportionate, much more pronounced in cultural productions in which one is more hegemonic than the other. Internet-enabled digital media has however, in the recent past, so liberalised artistic dissemination that hitherto disadvantaged groups, such as African diaspora communities, now have equal access to global audiences. This paper examines the social media memes and skits of Elvin Mensah, a Ghanaian living in the UK, who has a litany of street performances wherein he elicits variegated forms of responses from a range of diverse London residents. Some of his "events" are done on rush-hour London trains, such as surprise dates, barbecue, shower time, barbing session, and even a full-blown wedding. There are also pranks in which he refers to random strangers as "my wife" in live videos, COVID-19 self-distancing dates, and driving a miniature toy car into a McDonald's Drive-through. My study posits these street enactments as performances/performativities of public engagement and response - surprise, indifference, amusement, irritation, and participation - framed for their extraordinariness and deviation from the everyday. With this background, I explore the variegated binaries - immigrant/native, work/play, silence/speech, entertainment/social experiment, colonial/de- or postcolonial - at play within each happening. My work finds digital media to be a medium through which minority groups easily access a wider range of audiences. Works such as Mensah's are thus decolonial texts for the reification of otherness, instantiation of resistance of coloniality, and facilitation of a movement towards Walter Mignolo's (2011) "thinking with the other."