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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines ‘Terry Chocolat’s work on her You Tube Channel. I reflect on the ways in which her performance can be viewed as an ‘archival’ process involving popular and New Media to create interactive spaces for ‘re-writing’ histories on postcolonial experiences from ‘below’.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is an examination of ‘Terry Chocolat’s work on her You Tube Channel where she engages her ‘publics’ on Luo cultural identity and its intersections with other kinds of (identity) including national, gender, diasporic and the global. She is an example of an emerging trend in which talented and resourceful professionals, employ new media as a space for the performance of their role as content creators and social commentators in Kenya. By employing digital ethnography, I read the data obtained in relation to three main objectives of the study, namely: i) locating her work within the emerging trends established by other digital influencers on New Media platforms (ii) studying her performance style and its effectiveness in relation to the affordances of New Media (iii) exploring her representations of ‘troubled’ histories and how she engages her ‘publics’ in the exploration of political, economic and social issues in Kenya. Thus in this paper I discuss how Terry Chocolat interweaves between dramatic, cinematic and oral literary modes in her presentations on You-Tube . I further examine how her adoption of various stances and ‘masks’ allow her to cross various boundaries and engage her audiences in the interrogation of various contemporary concerns arising from troubled histories of Kenyan nationhood. Finally, I reflect on the ways in which her performance like that of emerging digital influencers in East Africa can be viewed as an ‘archival’ process involving popular and New Media to create interactive spaces for ‘re-writing’ histories on postcolonial experiences from ‘below’.