‘Humour and the Politics of Resistance’: Audience Readings of Popular Amateur Videos in Zimbabwe

Abstract

Zimbabwe’s restricted communicative space has spawned a diversity of alternative public spheres that allow citizens to participate in the broader debate on the country’s protracted crisis. Citizens are creatively using social media to express their needs and aspirations and resist and challenge different forms of domination. Using audience reception analysis as a methodology, and Nancy Fraser’s conceptualisation of the alternative public sphere, this chapter explores how audience reception of popular ‘amateur videos’ on social media and online platforms contributes to developing a subaltern counter-public. The chapter examines how citizens and audiences can resist, challenge and laugh at power in Zimbabwe. Focusing on Lameck ‘Makwiratiti’ Chimuka’s amateur video as a case study, the chapter contends that the reception of viral and seemingly banal ‘amateur videos’ that capture ordinary lives of Zimbabweans, using humour and jokes, constitutes a subaltern counter-public that enhances democratic discourse in the country. The study’s findings show that despite engaging with the politics of every day at the production level, amateur videos are creatively articulated to broader national politics of resistance by situated readers at the reception level. These findings confirm and reflect the agency of ordinary citizens to subvert hegemonic power in repressive regimes. They further cohere with audience reception theory that contends that the social context of consumption provides audiences with raw materials to negotiate meanings that are at times different from those suggested by the media text.