Digital Voices: Negotiating Global Forms & Local Identity in Performance Poetry from Cape Town
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past two decades, an increasing number of African writers have turned to digital media – particularly social media platforms – to publish, circulate, and discuss their work, developing new aesthetic networks and forms. In this essay, I analyze two site-specific performance poems pieces from Cape Town: Antjie Krog and Peter Odendaal’s “Rondeau in Four Parts” and Lwanda Sindaphi’s “State of the Nation’s Undress.” Each of these poems was originally performed in major theaters and each has since been published on YouTube making it a site of global consumption as well as a memorial to the original event. By examining the shift in reception between local and digital sites of performance, I demonstrate the influence of broader digital aesthetics – specifically the digital’s emphasis on popularity and spontaneity – in contemporary poetry styles from Cape Town as poets manage the dispersal of authority that comes with digital publication. Bringing sound studies critique of digital media to South African poetry, I argue that the voice – simultaneously a physical manifestation and symbolic representation of the self – carries heightened influence in digital settlings where the depth of sound is otherwise flattened.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".