Gaining currency: confession, comedy, and the economics of racial ambiguity in Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime

This essay analyzes Trevor Noah’s memoir, Born a Crime, and the narrator’s movement between racialized spaces, times, and identities in postapartheid South Africa. In spite of Noah’s self-identification as Black, social interactions interpellate him as white or Coloured, which frequently leads to conflict. As a means of survival, he mobilizes cultural knowledge – particularly language – to diffuse tension, influence interpretations of his body, and access socioeconomic advantages or escape disadvantages that accumulate in racialized spaces. I argue that the confessional form is an ideal genre to represent racial ambiguity because the genre itself, like the ambiguous narrator, operates upon a complex economy of revelation and concealment. The essay concludes by analyzing Noah’s comedy career and movement to the United States in order to explore transnational movements of the racially ambiguous body and the potential and pitfalls of representing racial ambiguity in twenty-first-century cultural production.