SOUTH PARK COLIN KAP PROFESSIONAL

SOUTH PARK COLIN KAP PROFESSIONAL

As a young professional Black tennis player with significant social capital and cultural influence, Osaka’s mask-wearing demonstrates her discursive power as a globally recognised athlete and as a woman of colour. In other words, in this particular social context this is how Osaka demonstrates resistance against discriminatory practices based on race. Framing Osaka’s overt form of protest in the larger context of the (re)awakened anti-racist efforts, I conclude that in these unprecedented moments in an unprecedented time Osaka self-amplifies her voice through her peaceful protest emphasising the names of those who have been murdered at the hands of American law enforcement. This is especially critical in our colourblind society wherein Black women’s experiences and voices are often ignored and/or dismissed. Given that tennis is a sport that historically and culturally values and represents whiteness, Osaka’s protest is emblematic of a new wave of Black athlete activism against systemic racism in the twenty-first century. Informed by Black feminist thought and intersectionality, this conceptual paper will reflect upon the importance of Osaka’s protest as a Black female athlete in the larger context of the reenergization of the Black Lives Matter movement. While Osaka has lived much of her life in America, she does not compete as American her father is Haitian and her mother is Japanese. Open victory in protest against systemic racism. In September 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, professional tennis player Naomi Osaka wore a black face mask for each of her seven matches towards her U.S. Leveraging the ambiguous logic of meme culture, we also illustrate how these cults fuel doppelganger characters and alternative narratives, in which support and mockery are blended together. At a general level, it is maintained that memetic cults are co-constructed by users participating in the collaborative practices of memetic production and circulation. By adopting a combination of automated visual analysis and discourse analysis, we demonstrate that memetic cults show some of the traits traditionally attributed to personality cults, while displaying unique features as well. Relying on digital methods for the data collection, our empirical inquiry focuses on a corpus of static image memes, memetic videos and newspaper articles collected across different platforms.

To do so, we focus on two case studies from the Italian political sphere: former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and Governor of Campania Region Vincenzo De Luca, both prominent media figures during the first lockdown. Our contribution aims at conceptualising the notion of «memetic cult of personality», which originates from the memetic production surrounding political figures, especially during periods of intense media coverage, like that triggered by the Coronavirus outbreak.

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