From carnival to cancelling: a dramaturgical analysis of the uncrowning of Unathi Nkayi on Twitter/X.
| dc.contributor.advisor | Stroud, Christopher | |
| 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. | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10566/20380 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.publisher | University of the Western Cape | |
| 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 |