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

by Shepherd Mpofu (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030792794
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	10/21/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	28 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

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. 

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Social media and COVID-19: Taking humour during pandemics seriously.- 2.Social media memes as commentary in health disasters in South Africa and Zimbabwe.- 3.Viral jokes: Humour and grace as critical devices in memes about the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil.- 4. ‘Coromentality’: Nigerians’ use of memetic humour during the COVID-19 lockdowns.- 5. Playfulness, or a subversion of hegemonic scientific knowledges? Analysing Internet memes and discourses on traditional medicines as remedies for COVID-19 in Zimbabwe.- 6. “Can we uninstall 2020 and install it again? This version has a virus!”: Humor and misinforming during COVID-19 pandemic on social media.- 7. Social media audience’s interpretation of selected humour memes on coronavirus pandemic in Nigeria.- 8.Coronavirus satire: A dissection of feminist politics and humour.- 9 ‘A nation that laughs together, stays together’: Deconstructing humour on Twitter during the national lockdown in SouthAfrica.- 10 Fear and loathing and laughter: Covid 19 as an expression of decolonial love.- 11 #VoetsekANC and Covid Corruption: A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of “A Song for the ANC”.- 12 Humour in the time of COVID-19 pandemic: A critical analysis of the subversive meanings of WhatsApp memes in Zimbabwe.- 13 Humour in the age of contagion: Coronavirus, ‘Janata Curfew’ meme, and India’s digital cultures of virality.- 14 The use of meme and hashtags on Twitter towards government response during the COVID-19 curfew announcement from 1st June -14th June 2020.- 15 Dark humour, ubuntu and the COVID-19 pandemic: A case of subaltern humoring of political elite deaths on social media.