The Ten$ion of Post-Apartheid Whiteness: A Study of Die Antwoord's Performance of White Identity and Power
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Die Antwoord are a South African rap group based in Cape Town that has achieved unparalleled success in the Western world.Ninja, Yolandi, and DJ Hi-Tek comprise the group, who, amongst many triumphs, have amassed nearly one billion views on YouTube and have starred in a major feature film titled Chappie directed by Neill Blomkamp.Whereas their Western fan base is vast, fervent, and embraces the group for their African Otherness, they are far less revered or even respected in their home nation.This understudied and misinterpreted international media and communication phenomenon is particularly fascinating because, as this interdisciplinary study argues, Die Antwoord's artistic production possesses a distinct postcolonial and postmodern mandate to tactically confront, through parody, what they view as the racial injustices of postapartheid South Africa.To meet these ends, they communicate themselves to audiences as an uncomfortable, provincial, morally bankrupt model of whiteness with the objective of repudiating and demystifying the colonial power of South African whiteness.Their objective is to become one with the other and to cultivate a sense of belonging across all races and cultures.Problematically, to reinscribe their whiteness, they unapologetically appropriate the unique cultural signs and symbols of other persecuted and unacknowledged South African races and cultures, particularly the culture of Coloured (South African term for people of mixed-heritage) men and boys who live in the gang-and poverty-ridden townships of the Cape Flats.Thus, Die Antwoord further embody and reinforce the ongoing supremacy of white colonialism.This study examines Die Antwoord's self-righteous altruistic mandate and their efficient postmodern communication tactics to cultivate interest in their work-most of which is based online.Primarily, this interdisciplinary analysis explores a model of young liberal white South Africans as being concurrently privileged, adrift, erratic, unstable, and entitled in a digital, post-apartheid South Africa.Moreover, it interrogates the enduring power of whiteness in an African country that continues to reckon with its treacherous Apartheid past.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".