Nigerian Digital Humor and the Cultural Politics of Public Trust

ConTrust Speaker Series

Lecture by James Tunde Yeku (HU Berlin)

My talk examines to what extent digital humour mediates encounters of public conflict and trust between internet subjects and the state in Nigeria. Specifically, I reflect on how the country’s police apparatus functions as a mirror of the neurosis and antinomies of the Nigerian state itself, demonstrating how citizens reproduce and respond to the banalities of police power through strategies of what I describe as cultural netizenship, the most immediate and condensed mode of cultural and political commentary on social media. Using online humour that ‘polices’ and keeps a close guard on various official sites of corporeal violence in Nigeria,  I am interested in how Nigerian cultural netizens respond to the institution of the police and its notoriously extrajudiciality which, itself, produces the conditions for mistrust (James Tunde Yeku).

Please register in advance: office@normativeorders.net

A standard assumption of research is that trust and conflict stand in opposition and exclude one another. The ConTrust Speaker Series questions that assumption and inquires into the dynamics of trust and conflict in various contexts of social life. Can trust arise in, manifest itself and be stabilized in conflicts rather than apart from them? What are the conditions for that?

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