Confronting Apartheid’s Revenants: Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime and/as Traumedy

This article explores the relationship between trauma and comedy as represented in Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. Drawing on Nira Yuval-Davis’s conceptualization of belonging and Jacques Derrida’s notions of hauntology and the revenant, I consider the attention Born a Crime gives to history, experience, and the memory of pre- and post-1994 South Africa. Specifically, I examine the ways in which Noah’s memoir comments on and contributes to a narrative of pain, identity, belonging, and racialized politics. I also argue that as Noah uses his personal and subjective experiences to critique the ideology of apartheid, he opens the dialogue for South Africans to interrogate their past in order for them to know how to deal with their psychosocial present.