Abstract
At a time when blatant racism has retreated and been replaced by more subtle (but not less destructive) forms of discrimination, implicit bias, and microaggressions, what defense does the subaltern have to respond? Charity Okezie, the Nigerian TikTok star, has been providing a steady stream of videos that respond to the question of racism and cultural identity. This study is a qualitative content analysis of the subjects and themes of her videos in combination with a screen textual critique of purposively sampled Okezie’s videos. The videos confront viewers – frontally – with radical and “violent” laughter, comic intrusions, and Bakhtinian excesses that discrown the force of persisting colonial representations of Africa, reminding viewers of the legacy of distorted Africa’s history while simultaneously reaffirming its enduring presentenseness and survivance. Okezie’s videos certainly offer forms of indexical self-representation. However, it is in their contextualization within a global political economy and sparks of unsettling nationalisms in Europe and America that analysis is most productive. In these TikTok videos, a fusion of thematic preoccupations, genre, and mise-en-scène congeal into moments where self-representation functions as instances of self-making and world-making of ethnic, national, and regional identities.
Presenters
Anthony AdahFaculty, School of Media Arts, Design and Entertainment, Minnesota State University Moorhead, Minnesota, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Strategic Essentialism, Identity politics, Self-making, World-making
