‘Yo Dumbfucks!’: Problematising “Transgressive” White Humour and the Use of Blackface in the Artworks of South African Visual Artist Anton Kannemeyer

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since the early 1990s, blackface has seen a resurgence in South Africa. In 2010, Pappa in Afrika, the artwork of White Afrikaner artist Anton Kannemeyer elicited public criticism. Interrogating Kannemeyer’s Pappa in Afrika, this paper questions assumptions of blackface’s parodic satire as inherently critical and transgressive, examining whether blackface can possibly be read as a “trickster” figure in its current usage. In analysing Kannemeyer’s use of parody and joke-work, it is argued that his ahistorical use of blackface seems rather to give psychic access to racially offensive visualisations prohibited by post-apartheid’s climate of political correctness, thereby producing pleasure via racial stereotypes under the guise of ‘social criticism’. The strategies used to safeguard the pleasure generated by offensive jokes are examined (which include refuting discordant readings of the work, foregrounding authorial intent and invoking a spirit of White victimhood). Drawing on the discourse of visual fetishism of the Black body by curator Okwui Enwezor, the mask of blackface is exposed as continued White economic and cultural power. The paper probes roles of responsibility and accountability to be asked of visual artists in this continued trade of Negrobilia emanating from “post-colonial” South Africa.