Abstract
This chapter explores how social media public commentaries on Zapiro’s cartoon illuminate diverse ways ordinary people engage with political texts, especially those with public interest. As shown in this chapter, commentaries on political cartoons can potentially raise serious political questions about who counts as human and what makes for a grievable life in South Africa where violence is a way of life, and where the means to secure self-defence are limited. This analysis is important, in large part, for contributing to scholarly debates by demonstrating the importance of combining macro with the micro in the analysis of texts. This intellectualisation is central because racism fundamentally concerns the doubting of those on the margins of the economic divide.
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Notes
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‘If 200,000 Iraqi children were killed during the Gulf War and its aftermath,’ do we have an image, a frame for any of those lives, singly or collectively? Is there a story we might find about those deaths in the media? Are there names attached to those children’ (Butler, 2004, p. 34).
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Permission to reproduce this cartoon has been granted. First published in Daily Maverick 16/08/2019.
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Butler (2004, p. 34) continues: Although we might argue that it would be impractical to write obituaries for all those people, or for all people, I think we have to ask, again and again, how the obituary functions as the instrument by which grievability is publicly distributed. It is the means by which a life becomes, or fails to become, a publicly grievable life, an icon for national self-recognition, the means by which a life becomes noteworthy. As a result, we have to consider the obituary as an act of nation-building. The matter is not a simple one, for, if life is not grievable, it is not quite a life; it does not qualify as a life and is not worth a note. It is already the unburied, if not the unburiable.
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Makgoba, M., Mashatole, A. (2021). Zapiro’s Satirical Reconstruction of Marikana Victims and Representation of Mourning. In: Mpofu, S. (eds) The Politics of Laughter in the Social Media Age. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81969-9_4
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