Fatty Boom Boom and the Transnationality of Blackface in Die Antwoord's Racial Project

Abstract

The South African hip hop group Die Antwoord deploys blackface performance as part of a racial project that characterizes race as contingent and mutable in contrast to its rigid apartheid articulation. Examining the flows that carry their work transnationally makes visible the ways US cultural consumption becomes entangled with processes of racialization.

Monstrous Transformations

“…Past analysis of Die Antwoord mainly center around whether these transformations constitute a form of blackface of either marginal whites or black South Africans (Schmidt 2014;Haupt 2012;Scott 2012) or, often borrowing on the language of postmodernism, if they represent some sort of post-racial, cyborg assemblage capable of destroying binary categories of black and white or a display of the racial liminality of Afrikaner identity (Bekker & Levon 2020;Obbard & Cork 2016;Chruszczewska 2015;Parry 2015;Smit 2015;Du Preez 2011;Marx & Milton 2011). What is often missing from these debates is the sheer horrific absurdity of the portrayal, which elicits a jouissance combining repulsion and fear for the racialized other with humorous irony and the ridiculousness of that reaction.…”