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The columnist as trickster: satire and subversion in literary journalism. GREIG DOUGLAS Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of the requirements for the degree of Magister Artium in the Faculty of Arts at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, January 2012. Supervisor: Dr M L Crous Co-supervisor: Prof L Hibbert Table of Contents Page. i. Abstract. PART 1: A self-reflexive essay examining the complicity of South African satire in the perpetuation of white normativity. 1. Introduction 1 2. Satire, whiteness and related concepts. 4 3. Background to The Weekly Crab. 3.1: Positioning. 8 3.2: Audience. 11 4. A critique of Hayibo. 12 5. A critique of The Weekly Crab. 26 6. Conclusion. 37 7. Bibliography. 39 PART 2: The Weekly Crab (editions 1 to 13) as a creative, countertextual response to instances of white normativity in mainstream South African satire. i. 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. Key words: Whiteness, satire, literary journalism, media critique of whiteness. 1 PART 1: A self-reflexive essay examining the complicity of South African satire in the perpetuation of white normativity. 1. Introduction. This introduction serves as an academic contextualisation of what the main body of my Master‟s thesis – The Weekly Crab – has to offer as a serious and rigorous investigation into the medium of satire as it manifests in contemporary South African literary journalism. That is, I would like to explain the ways in which the satire of The Weekly Crab plays on a keen understanding of literary and philosophical theory, and how my work occupies itself, however obliquely, with making a contribution to the tradition of whiteness studies in the South African context. Literary journalism, as the term implies, operates in the intersection between journalism and literature. Sims (1995:3) sees it is a kind of creative nonfiction that uses literary techniques to comment on factual events, or make incisive commentary on matters of broad social relevance, teasing out „the hidden patterns of community life‟. This it does without the customary newspaper strictures of objectivity and fairness placed upon it, allowing the literary journalist a licence to comment on whatever they like and draw, implies Sims, on the rhetorical freedoms afforded to novelists (2007: 1). While this traditionally has been the sphere of the independent columnist – and I do include the work of several columnists to make important points about satire – I also intend to broaden the scope of what is possible for the satirical literary journalist. As I hope to show, the satire produced in a fake news format is able to present a creative, multifarious community of performed voices that can reimagine the scope and practice of the columnist. Chance and McKeen (2001: xiii) observe that literary journalism is arguably less constrained than other types of journalism, and that it blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. In writing The Weekly Crab, I wanted to free myself of the singular, defining voice to which the columnist is often confined, and play around, with unlimited freedom, in the range of rhetorical strategies available to the literary trickster – the writer who teases out the hidden absurdities and hypocrisies within ways of speaking we typically regard as natural. 2 I will look to define satire as a form of conceptual, rhetorical attack that aims to bring into question the normativity of accepted ideas and pervasive mental attitudes by creating a „carnival‟ of performed voices. This is a Bakhtinian conception of the genre (1984: 102-107). As such, satire will be formulated as a literary technique that allows an author to „channel‟ or put on ludicrous display diverse but distinctive manner of speaking (1984: 102-107). For Bakhtin, these ways of speaking are learnt linguistic codes that function as actual ways of interpreting, seeing and being in the world: a language, therefore, in a Bakhtinian reading of it, is also a kind of subjectivity, and a form of power (1984: 101-107). By enacting these linguistic strategies of authority and identity – in short, by parodying them – satire can create a living carnival of competing, heterogeneous perspectives. In this way, these identities are shown to be roles that the satirist can perform – and twist – in order to advance a certain argument. This underscores for the reader both the constructedness of identity and, in turn, the absurdity of any claims to power the discourses being satirised make. In short, satire will be shown to be a thesis art: a rhetorical strategy that undermines discursive structures of power by using and, most crucially, subverting recognised forms of rhetoric to expose the folly and hypocrisy therein. The satire in The Weekly Crab focuses mostly scrutinising South African male whiteness as it manifests as an identifying ideology of normativity. I have done this out of the belief that satire, as a literary mode of rigorous fault-finding, inquiry and testing examination, ought to focus its unforgiving gaze on the dominant structures of social power in an effort to qualify the inherent unnaturalness of their constructions. As West notes (2009: 11), whiteness is powerful „sociocultural construct that has been brought into being‟, a notion reinforced by Steyn (2001: 116-117) who sees whiteness as an „artificial privilege‟ handed down to her via a „complex heritage‟. Whiteness, through this understanding, is a „complex social identity‟, one that „positions the bearer within complex social constructions that have real material and psychological consequences‟ (2001: 117). Using these theories of identity and race construction, I position whiteness as a discourse that still, despite the advent of democracy, maintains a 3 dominant cultural hegemony in South Africa. In line with that identification of whiteness as a marker of normalcy and aspiration, I argue that the role of South African satire, as medium designed to challenge dominant ways of thinking, is to examine unforgivingly the modes of living and thinking in modern white South Africa. Indeed, Steyn (2001: 150) points to a shifting political economy in South Africa and the „tip[ping] of the Western centre‟ as evidence that whiteness in this country is now a more contested terrain than ever before. The „white norm‟, she writes, is losing its „statutory credibility‟ (2001: 150). I want to examine how my work in The Weekly Crab uses an understanding of that to add to the fracturing of white discursive power in the new South Africa. But before I outline and offer an analysis of my own satire, I shall present and examine the work of another source of South African satire, Hayibo. By rendering a close analysis of my own creative work alongside the (very popular) satirical writing now being produced in South Africa I hope to reveal the ways in which I have tried to cover an ideological terrain I feel has been neglected by mainstream South African satirists such as Hayibo. Where I have tried in much – but not strictly all – of my satire to interrogate and pick apart the meaning of modern whiteness in a readable, appealing way with the intention of undermining its cultural centrality, I see Hayibo‟s satire tacitly promoting racial hierarchies. My analysis of the website will show how it validly targets a black-led national government, but does so in a way that is couched in archaic conceptions of blackness. Where I try to cultivate a self-reflexive and deliberately oppositional stance to my own race, I see Hayibo often playing on default white fears and anxieties: the fear that their country is headed towards inevitable ruin (2001: 158); the anxiety that the white political voice is increasingly a diminished one (2001: 71); the worry that economic power and the access to material comforts will be taken away (2009: 158); and, ultimately, a defensiveness about their race that too easily precludes the „black position‟ being „taken seriously‟ (2001: 106).

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