Genres of protest in post-apartheid South Africa: Revisiting audience contributions to political speeches

Protest is reconfiguring the political landscape in many places around the world in recent years. Political speeches have been analysed to date as one-person speeches with few interruptions from the audience except in the form of applause, laughter or booing in backchannel utterances of uninterrupting agreement, or clarificatory questions (see, for example Atkinson 1984; Heritage & Greatbatch 1986 on applause; Guerini, et al 2013 on tagging audience reactions). However, little attention has been given to the function of audience response to political speeches as significantly shaping the whole event of protest. Focusing on the discourse of a specific speech that was delivered at Rondebosch Common, in Cape Town, South Africa on 26 June 2012, and integrating a critical discourse- and conversation-analytic perspective, we argue that: (a) audience participation is crucial to the speech’s discourse, including the construction of a collaborative identity; (b) the speech is an exercise of ‘linguistic citizenship’ (Stroud 2001), drawing on multiple linguistic practices and resources from South African society; and, in light of the aforementioned, (c) the speech subverts ‘conventional’ political speeches, indicating a more participatory, hybrid genre rooted in African oral tradition and performance (Brown 1998; Cronin 1988).