From carnival to cancelling: A dramaturgical analysis of the uncrowning of Unathi Nkayi on Twitter/X.
| dc.contributor.advisor | Stroud, C | |
| dc.contributor.advisor | Bock, Z | |
| dc.contributor.author | Kirby, America | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2025-05-07T08:38:53Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2025-05-07T08:38:53Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2024 | |
| dc.description.abstract | This study presents results from an incident that stemmed from famous South African singer, actress and radio personality Unathi Nkayi’s personal opinion on the 2015 Luister documentary (which sheds light on racism at Stellenbosch University). The overarching interest was to explore how Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical approach could be used, in conjunction with Bakhtin’s (1968) notion of carnival, to analyse the interaction between Nkayi and @ThisIsPalo, as well as Twitter/X’s audience responses to their interaction. The study draws on a virtual linguistic ethnography, computer-mediated discourse analysis and multimodal discourse analysis in order to analyse the multimodal content found on Twitter/X, taking a particular interest in how this adapted language use is utilized as a tool for negative and toxic interaction; for online harassment. Goffman’s ritual interchange is used to break down the interaction in order to determine how and when interaction escalates from playful to harassment, while Bakhtin’s notion of carnival was invoked as analytical tools to analyse how the Twitter/X audience brought Nkayi from a king (celebrity) down to a clown (peasant); uncrowning her through the use of memes. One thing that stands out, in the findings on this study, is that the commentary on Twitter/X was not as directly toxic and hostile as expected. It was found that the Twitter/X users were rather crafty in their responses to Nkayi; by utilizing memes in order to poke fun at her, they also used her own words against her. These findings not only provide insight into a phenomenon very common within the American context, with a South African perspective, but it also contributes to the growing body of work that merge the old with the new; that is, using theorists such as Goffman and Bakhtin to make sense of how and why individuals interact within the online social space. | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10566/20380 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.publisher | University of the Western Cape | |
| dc.subject | Luister Documentary | |
| dc.subject | Virtual Linguistic Ethnography | |
| dc.subject | Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis | |
| dc.subject | Twitter/X | |
| dc.subject | Facework | |
| dc.subject | Carnivalesque | |
| dc.title | From carnival to cancelling: A dramaturgical analysis of the uncrowning of Unathi Nkayi on Twitter/X. | |
| dc.type | Thesis |