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ABSTRACT
This essay analyzes Trevor Noah’s memoir, Born a Crime, and the narrator’s movement between racialized spaces, times, and identities in postapartheid South Africa. In spite of Noah’s self-identification as Black, social interactions interpellate him as white or Coloured, which frequently leads to conflict. As a means of survival, he mobilizes cultural knowledge – particularly language – to diffuse tension, influence interpretations of his body, and access socioeconomic advantages or escape disadvantages that accumulate in racialized spaces. I argue that the confessional form is an ideal genre to represent racial ambiguity because the genre itself, like the ambiguous narrator, operates upon a complex economy of revelation and concealment. The essay concludes by analyzing Noah’s comedy career and movement to the United States in order to explore transnational movements of the racially ambiguous body and the potential and pitfalls of representing racial ambiguity in twenty-first-century cultural production.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Twidle, “In a Country,” 9.
2 Ibid., 5, 16. After listing the paradigmatic, and primarily white, authors of South African nonfiction, Twidle asks an important question: “why is it that, during a period when many readers of South African writing hoped for a more culturally diverse array of literary voices, one is confronted with the fact that most of these [authors] emerge from – or must define themselves in relation to – a problematic tradition of (white) South African liberalism enshrined in the very name of the prize?” – i.e., the Alan Paton Award for Nonfiction (9). Gesturing toward an answer to Twidle’s question, this essay analyzes Noah’s representation of the residual value of whiteness in democratic South Africa.
3 Twidle, Experiments with Truth, 4.
4 Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young argue in Neo-Passing that, although the term “passing” once primarily referred to an American practice of a Black individual performing a white identity in order to secure socioeconomic benefits attached to whiteness, identity passing has evolved and expanded in the United States and in other global contexts as well. In spite of predictions that racial passing would fizzle out in America following the Civil Rights struggle and the dismantling of Jim Crow and de jure segregation, passing “is now used as often to describe a white person who dupes people into believing he or she is black, a gay person who presents him- or herself as straight, a poor person who presents him- or herself as rich, a white author who uses an Asian name to get published, and so on” (Godfrey and Young, Neo-Passing, 1–2).
5 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1712–13.
6 Ibid., 1714, 1736.
7 1713n. 6, 1790.
8 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 226.
9 For instance, if defining Blackness is a matter of ancestry and origins, then taken to its farthest possible conclusion, every human has a legitimate claim to Blackness because human life originates in what is now Africa. On the other hand, if Blackness comes down to phenotype or culture, then people who identify as Black in one context may find themselves excluded from Blackness in another context.
10 Wright, Physics of Blackness, 4. Regarding the capitalization of “Epiphenomenal,” Wright explains that in formal philosophical usage, “epiphenomenal is not itself causal but nonetheless correlates with causal phenomena.” As Wright uses the term, “‘Epiphenomenal’ time denotes the current moment, a moment that is not directly borne out of another (i.e., causally created)” (Ibid., 4; emphasis in original).
11 According to Wright, all collective identities consist of “a ‘continuum’ or historical continuity for any given group,” however, “to enjoy continuity … one must sacrifice diversity” for the sake of constructing a “linear progress narrative of history” (Ibid., 19). Phenomenological manifestations of Blackness, on the other hand, are “richly incorporative of a diversity of identities” and “bring to light Black identities that had been erased, marginalized, or forgotten,” however, theorists “cannot find these moments until we first locate them on a linear timeline” (Ibid., 17).
12 Ibid., 22.
13 Ibid., 71.
14 Snorton, “A New Hope,” 79.
15 Johnson, Appropriating Blackness, 5–6.
16 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 81; emphasis in original.
17 Ibid., 81; emphasis in original.
18 Ibid., 82.
19 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 252.
20 In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, Rousseau writes that he would never steal money because money itself does not tempt him. But, by stealing something he wants such as a cake, Rousseau keeps his money and possesses the object he desires. Coetzee presses this logic by asking why Rousseau cannot simply request the object rather than steal it. Coetzee concludes that Rousseau steals because “shamefulness” and “value” are interchangeable in confessional discourse. In other words, “in the economy of confession … the only appetites that constitute confessable currency, are shameful appetites. A shameful desire is a valuable desire. Conversely, for a desire to have a value it must have a secret, shameful component” (Coetzee, “Confession and Double Thoughts,” 272). Rousseau’s theft gives him something new, something shameful, to confess, and the discourse can carry on.
21 Twidle, Experiments with Truth, 66.
22 You Laugh but It’s True, 6:20–7:00.
23 You Laugh but It’s True, 0:20–0:48.
24 Born a Crime uses a lower-case C and the American spelling, “colored,” which I reproduce when quoting the text.
25 Noah, Born a Crime, 119.
26 Ibid., 27.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., 26.
29 Ibid., 120.
30 Ibid., 28.
31 Ibid., 30.
32 Ibid., 52.
33 Ibid., 6.
34 Ibid., 8; emphasis in original.
35 Ibid., 15.
36 Ibid., 15.
37 Ibid., 55.
38 Ibid., 65.
39 Ibid., 63.
40 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 97.
41 Ibid., 97.
42 Noah, Born a Crime, 74.
43 Ibid., 69.
44 Ibid., 57.
45 Ibid., 59.
46 Ibid., 55.
47 Ibid., 56.
48 Ibid., 56.
49 Mafe, Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature, 8; emphasis in original.
50 Noah’s characterization of Coloured identity in Born a Crime has received some online scrutiny. Ryland Fisher writes that “Noah might have more than 10 million Twitter followers, but that does not make him an expert on anything, least of all something as complex as the smorgasbord that is known as coloured identity.”
51 Noah, Born a Crime, 115–16.
52 Ibid., 117; emphasis in original.
53 Ibid., 120–21.
54 Ibid., 118.
55 Ibid., 140.
56 Marx, Capital, Volume I, 254–55.
57 Noah, Born a Crime, 187.
58 Ibid., 188. Regarding the freedom that comes with the possession of money, Rousseau writes: “I love liberty; I hate embarrassment, worry, and constraint. As long as the money lasts in my purse, it assures me of independence and relieves me of the need of plotting to obtain more, a need which has always appalled me. So afraid am I to see it end that I treasure it. Money in one’s possession is the instrument of liberty; money one pursues is the symbol of servitude” (Confessions, 46).
59 Noah, Born a Crime, 190.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid., 201.
62 Ibid., 204.
63 Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place, 245.
64 Noah, Born a Crime, 217.
65 Ibid., 208.
66 Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place, 19; 124.
67 Noah, Born a Crime, 218.
68 Ibid., 218–19.
69 Ibid., 224.
70 Ibid., 234.
71 Ibid., 238.
72 Ibid., 240.
73 Ibid., 257.
74 Ibid., 278.
75 Ibid., 279.
76 Ibid., 279.
77 Ibid., 284.
78 Baron, “Trevor Noah on His Surreal Journey.”
79 Lowery, “Trevor Noah Is Still Trying to Explain America.”
80 Obaro, “Trevor Noah Still Doesn’t Get It.”
81 Ibid.
82 See Melamed, “Racial Capitalism,” and Robinson, Black Marxism.
83 Coetzee, Truth in Autobiography, 5.
84 Noah, “Let’s Not be Divided.”
Additional information
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Kenton Butcher
Kenton Butcher is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include African American and South African literature, Africana studies, and film studies. He is currently working on his dissertation project that compares twenty-first-century confessional literature featuring racially ambiguous narrators set in the United States and South Africa.