Writing on the Moroccan festival, Driss El Maarouf explores what calls “shit” within a sphere of what he terms “po(o)pular culture (2015; 2016). In his work, El Maarouf posits the po(o)pular as excremental, exploring the ways in which the po(o)pular can be a form of resistance, even as those framed within its terms speak back to power by subverting those terms. Here, El Maarouf draws upon the work of theorists such as Bakhtin, whose work around the carnivalesque in popular culture gives a categorization in which the excremental can be placed. Rabelais further links the carnivalesque to the body in his work around the grotesque, even as Bhaktin adds that the “grotesque realism” of representations of the body and its functions – eating, drinking, discharging excrement, and sexual practices – has its origins in popular culture, and can be termed as excremental.
With these broad arguments in mind, my paper begins and extends the project of examining the grotesque and carnivalesque on (popular) social media sites in Kenya. Underpinned by the positionalities of the multi-textualities of social media from Karin Barber’s (2005) assertions of text as being written and non-written for example, and her arguments linking text and performance, I examine the ways in which social media “texts” not only embody performance, but further enter the realms of the excremental. I am interested in the ways in which the excremental not only embodies resistance, but can also be used as a form of oppression. This push and pull between oppression and resistance takes place within the cyber-spatial continuum, where a near-seamless interplay between cyber-sphere and the ‘real’ socio-political and cultural spheres. Using post-2017 political dispensation, in which Kenya participated in two drawn presidential elections, and their aftermath, I explore the use of the carnivalesque and the grotesque in examining these forms of intertextual excrementality within the realm of ‘po(o)pular culture.
This paper is part of a larger project on the epistemology of researching online spaces as part of (emergent) popular sites of culture, and indeed, of performance.
Key words: popular culture; online communities; cyber-sphere; epistemology; text; performance; cyber-cultures; excrementality; carnivalesque.