Digital Humour in the Covid-19 Pandemic: Perspectives from the Global South

ISBN-13: 9783030792817 / Angielski / Miękka / 2022

Mpofu, Shepherd

Opis

Digital humour in the COVID-19 pandemic: Perspectives from the Global South offers a groundbreaking intervention on how digital media were used from below by ordinary citizens to negotiate the global pandemic humorously. This book considers the role played by digital media during the pandemic, and indeed in the socio-political life of the Global South, as indispensable and revolutionary to human communication. In many societies, humour not only signifies laughter and frivolity, but acts as an important echo that accompanies, critiques, questions, disrupts, agitates and comments on societal affairs and the human condition. This book analyses citizens’ use of social media and humour to mediate the pandemic in a diverse range of countries, including Brazil, India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe.  The book will appeal to academics and students of media and communication studies, political studies, rhetoric, and to policy makers.

Spis treści

CHAPTER 1 Social media and COVID-19: Taking humour during pandemics seriously

CHAPTER 2 Social media memes as commentary in health disasters in South Africa and Zimbabwe

CHAPTER 3 Viral jokes: Humour and grace as critical devices in memes about the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil

CHAPTER 4 ‘Coromentality’: Nigerians’ use of memetic humour during the COVID-19 lockdowns

CHAPTER 5 Playfulness, or a subversion of hegemonic scientific knowledges? Analysing Internet memes and discourses on traditional medicines as remedies for COVID-19 in Zimbabwe

CHAPTER 6 “Can we uninstall 2020 and install it again? This version has a virus!”: Humor and misinforming during COVID-19 pandemic on social media

CHAPTER 7 Social media audience’s interpretation of selected humour memes on coronavirus pandemic in Nigeria

CHAPTER 8 Coronavirus satire: A dissection of feminist politics and humour

CHAPTER 9 ‘A nation that laughs together, stays together’: Deconstructing humour on Twitter during the national lockdown in South Africa

CHAPTER 10 Fear and loathing and laughter: Covid 19 as an expression of decolonial love

CHAPTER 11 #VoetsekANC and Covid Corruption: A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of “A Song for the ANC”

CHAPTER 12 Humour in the time of COVID-19 pandemic: A critical analysis of the subversive meanings of WhatsApp memes in Zimbabwe

CHAPTER 13 Humour in the age of contagion: Coronavirus, ‘Janata Curfew’ meme, and India’s digital cultures of virality

CHAPTER 14 The use of meme and hashtags on Twitter towards government response during the COVID-19 curfew announcement from 1st June -14th June 2020

CHAPTER 15 Dark humour, ubuntu and the COVID-19 pandemic: A case of subaltern humoring of political elite deaths on social media

O autorze

Shepherd Mpofu is Associate Professor in Media and Communications at the University of Limpopo, South Africa. He is an African Humanities Programme Fellow. He is co-editor of Mediating Xenophobia in Africa (Palgrave, 2020). He regularly publishes in academic journals on themes such as media and identity, media and protests, gender and race. 

Blurb

Digital humour in the COVID-19 pandemic: Perspectives from the Global South offers a groundbreaking intervention on how digital media were used from below by ordinary citizens to negotiate the global pandemic humorously. This book considers the role played by digital media during the pandemic, and indeed in the socio-political life of the Global South, as indispensable and revolutionary to human communication. In many societies, humour not only signifies laughter and frivolity, but acts as an important echo that accompanies, critiques, questions, disrupts, agitates and comments on societal affairs and the human condition. This book analyses citizens’ use of social media and humour to mediate the pandemic in a diverse range of countries, including Brazil, India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe.  The book will appeal to academics and students of media and communication studies, political studies, rhetoric, and to policy makers.

Shepherd Mpofu is Associate Professor in Media and Communications at the University of Limpopo, South Africa. He is an African Humanities Programme Fellow. He is co-editor of Mediating Xenophobia in Africa (Palgrave, 2020). He regularly publishes in academic journals on themes such as media and identity, media and protests, gender and race.