Consumption, Media and Culture in South Africa

Perspectives on Freedom and the Public

Mehita Iqani, Bridget Kenny, Mehita Iqani, Bridget Kenny

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138963337
• eBook ISBN: 9781317332299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is the first of its kind to bring together a collection of critical scholarly work on consumer culture in South Africa, exploring the cultural, political, economic, and social aspects of consumption in post-Apartheid society.

From sushi and Japanese diplomacy to Queen Sophie's writhing gown, from middle class Sowetan golfers to an indebted working class citizenry, from wedding websites to wedding nostalgia, from the liberation of consuming to the low wage labour of selling, the chapters in this book demonstrate a variety of themes, showing that to start with consumption, rather than ending with it, allows for new insights into long-standing areas of social research. By mapping, exploring and theorizing the diverse aspects of consumption and consumer culture, the volume collectively works towards a fresh set of empirically rooted conceptual commentaries on the politics, economics, and social dynamics of modern South Africa. This effort, in turn, can serve as a foundation for thinking less parochially about neoliberal power and consumer culture.

On a global scale, studying consumption in South Africa matters because in some ways the country serves as a microcosm for global patterns of income inequality, race-based economic oppression, and hopes for the material betterment of life. By exploring what consumption means on the 'local' scale in South Africa, the possibility arises to trace new global links and dissonances. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Arts.

Articles

Chewing on Japan: consumption, diplomacy and Kenny Kunene’s nyotaimori scandal

Cobus van Staden

Abstract

In 2010, the South African entrepreneur Kenny Kunene caused a sensation in South Africa when he ate sushi off a naked woman’s body at his birthday party. The practice – called nyotaimori in Japanese – was swiftly characterised as a Japanese tradition. In the process, sushi itself came to stand in for nouveau riche consumption. This article analyses the construction of Japan in the subsequent South African and Japanese coverage of the scandal. It puts it in the context of attempts by the Japanese government to use elite consumption as a form of public diplomacy. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this article shows that nyotaimori was used in the subsequent scandal as a way for South Africans to define themselves – a process that reveals how embedded South Africa remains in Western ideoscapes. Through comparing Japanese and South African accounts of the scandal, this article raises questions about the role of consumption in diplomacy and the construction of the foreign.

Introduction

In 2010, the nightclub owner and goldmine executive, Kenny Kunene, celebrated his 40^th birthday party at his club ZAR in Sandton, Johannesburg. Video of the event, which soon circulated, caused a controversy that continued for months. In these images a young black woman in a bikini is lying on a table. Leaves cover her thighs and stomach, and on the leaves rest a few pieces of rolled sushi. Kunene awkwardly leans over the woman, directly taking a whole piece of sushi into his mouth. A few weeks later, at a second party in Cape Town, a white model acted as a human platter lying on the hood of a white Maserati. Kunene was clearly performing for the cameras, and the reaction was swift. For the next few months, he was condemned and defended from many different quarters. Sushi became shorthand for the excess of the ruling class, similar to gravy before. Eating sushi off the prone body of a woman – called nyotaimori – came in for particular scorn. In Japanese, nyotaimori literally means ‘presented on a female body’, and nyotaimori parties were marketed as Japanese tradition in certain Western cities during the late 2000s, from where it made its way to Kunene’s party.

The incident, while mostly described as revealing the relations between South African elites and subalterns, also has transnational importance. In particular, it has important implications for contemporary Japanese cultural diplomacy. Current trends of linking Japanese geopolitical and economic goals to the consumption of Japanese products in emerging markets leaves Japan vulnerable to the imaginative construction of Japan in these emerging markets. The Kunene incident affords us a glimpse of local South African class relations. It also points to how ‘Japan’ is circulated globally. Through engagement with the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1998), Edward Said (1995) and Arjun Appadurai (1996), I argue that the Kunene incident raises troubling questions both within South Africa and for its relationship with Asia.

This article focuses on the close coverage of the Kunene controversy in the South African press, and examines the more sporadic coverage of the incident in the Japanese media. A basic South African dataset of 69 articles and op-eds, mostly published in 2010 and 2011, was selected. While drawing on different media, the focus here is on newspapers, because they featured a range of discussion, from pure reporting to pure editorialising, that revealed the most about how the incident was used in a dialogue of South African self-definition between writers and readers. Figures like Kunene and prominent African National Congress (ANC) members used newspapers to shape their depiction, which made newspapers the primary site for this dialogue. In the case of Japanese media, I was constrained by the fact that the incident made very little news there, and I collected all the articles I could find that mentioned the incident. The first section briefly lays out my theoretical approach to the complexities of the Kunene incident in the context of Japanese diplomacy. This is followed with a description of how the Japanese approach to consumption-based cultural diplomacy has shifted over the last decade. The subsequent three sections apply critical discourse analysis to the main dataset as well as a set of supplemental media materials. The focus is on three main themes: the role of the nyotaimori in South African self-definition, how this incident reveals South Africa’s embeddedness in the Western ideoscape (Appadurai 1993: 220), and how ‘Asia’ was implicitly constructed in the discursive treatment of Japanese cuisine.

Theorising the consumption of foreignness in post-apartheid South Africa

In applying a theoretical lens to the Kunene controversy in the context of transnational consumption I draw on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, especially his analysis in Distinction of how taste is deployed in order to safeguard class difference. This article contributes to the conversation about how Bourdieu should be applied to South Africa – a conversation which was kicked off by Michael Burawoy and Karl von Holdt (2012) and Ian Glenn (2010). Applying Bourdieu’s concept of distinction to how contemporary South African elite consumption is embedded in global flows of consumption is a useful starting point, but it also has serious limitations.

The first main limitation is that it does not offer sufficient tools to problematise the consumption of foreignness as a form of distinction. The consumption of overseas versus South African commodities played a crucial role in discussions of the Kunene incident. Even more important than the foreign/local split were distinctions between more and less acceptable forms of foreignness, with Japanese cuisine implicitly cordoned off from European brand names in much of the discussion of Kunene’s sushi parties. This means that the issue of foreign versus local is further complicated by the construction of the South African nation in the wake of apartheid. While Bourdieu could contribute to thinking about the role of consumption in the imaginative construction of post-apartheid South African identity, his work on consumption does not necessarily help us to think about the construction of Asia as part of South African self-definition in the wake of the Kunene controversy. While the controversy inserted nyotaimori into the South African construction of Japan or Asia, it more crucially acted as something against which South Africans could define themselves. This convenient application of Asia as a negative space revealing the self, calls for the application of the work of Edward Said (1995) in a South African context.

The second main limitation is that neither account of consumption allows us to fully deal with the mediated nature of the Kunene saga. The fact that the nyotaimori incident and the subsequent criticism not only played out in the media but for the media complicates the traditional Bourdieusian reading of distinction as revealing unconscious habitus. Rather, I draw on Michael Burawoy and Karl von Holdt’s (2012) relocation of Bourdieu to the South African context. Burawoy and Von Holdt (ibid: 5) read Bourdieu as ‘primarily a theorist of order and its reproduction’, whose work takes on resonance in the context of post-apartheid’s ‘disruption of master narratives and their attendant certainties’. Burawoy argues that as South Africa goes through both the rapid formation of new elites and the rapid dispossession of subalterns, Bourdieu’s view of habitus as a relatively stable set of unconscious structures directing class identity has to be reread in the context of a rapidly changing symbolic order. Drawing on their point, I argue that nyotaimori created a site of symbolic struggle where both sides were redefining the symbolic order through the appropriation of different class roles.

As Kunene’s local appropriation of Japanese cuisine grabbed South African headlines, the Japanese government was (and still is) attempting to popularise Japanese products and traditions as marks of distinction in key emerging markets. The construction of Japan by consumers in the Global South is therefore not only a case of appropriation, but also of the strategic deployment of markers of ‘Japaneseness’ into the symbolic orders of emerging consumer markets by the Japanese government. In discussing this simultaneous appropriation from the South and deployment from the North, I draw on Arjun Appadurai’s terminology to describe flows and counterflows of goods and images within the global mediascape. This simultaneously allows an examination of the mediated nature of the controversy, and a look at the flow of ‘Japaneseness’ as one of several competing and interrelated flows. This vocabulary, together with the work of Said (1995), provides the tools to discuss how ‘Japaneseness’ or ‘Asian-ness’ were used to construct ‘South African-ness’ both in South African and Japanese accounts of the controversy. In addition, it shows how the construction of nyotaimori as a Japanese tradition reveals South Africa’s continued embeddedness in a Western ideoscape. As Appadurai (1996: 220) makes clear, an ideoscape does not simply designate the flow of ideas, but is ideologically linked to Enlightenment ideas of statecraft: ‘These ideoscapes are composed of elements of the Enlightenment worldview, which consists of a concatenation of ideas, terms and images, including “freedom”, “welfare”, “rights”, “sovereignty”, “representation” and the master-term “democracy”.’

Søren Askegaard (2007: 87) argues that the global rise of neoliberalism has led to a crucial insertion of business into this concatenation, with branding playing a particularly important role:

Branding as a (global) ideoscape thus provides the ideological basis for the establishment of new meaning systems, new practices and new identity forms for the members of the consumer culture. It provides the logical basis for the whole idea of ‘experience economy’, of new distinctions between social groups, of new types of (brand) communities, new central stories in people’s lives and new identification patterns of both oneself and others.

However, with Appadurai (1996), I would insist that these stories are not necessarily new, but that they should be seen as part of the Enlightenment narratives used by the West to define itself. The most important of these narratives (for the purposes of this article) is the West’s self-definition through the identification of Asia as the other – a process intricately described by Edward Said.

Cool cuisine: Japan’s contemporary cultural diplomacy

During the latter half of the 20^th century, Japan focused on building links with Asia and the global northwest, with Africa receiving less attention. It followed an overall mercantilist foreign policy in Africa, with little engagement with the political and cultural realities of African societies (Lumumba-Kasongo 2010). The one exception was aid, with Japan becoming a top donor during the 1980s. During the 2000s, it reduced its aid due to its prolonged recession, but announced renewed aid measures during the 2008 and 2013 Tokyo International Conferences on African Development (TICAD) (Iwata 2012: 219; TICAD V 2013). Meanwhile, the Japanese government has engaged in only minimal cultural engagement in Africa (Kishimori 2013). However, Japanese pop culture, in the form of anime (Japanese animation), was already broadcast in South Africa from the late 1970s, so the absence of government-fueled cultural diplomacy does not imply the absence of Japanese culture in South Africa (Van Staden 2011).

From 2004, the Japanese government’s ‘Cool Japan’ campaign attempted to use the global popularity of Japanese cultural industries for diplomatic purposes. Instead of simply sending artists to conduct foreign tours, as the United States (US) State Department has done (Schneider and Nelson 2008), Japanese cultural diplomacy targets the role of Brand Japan in adding value to consumption. In a report, the ‘Cool Japan’ Advisory Council (2011: 2), a body advising the Japanese government on cultural diplomacy, made clear the overlap between Japanese industrial production and conceptions of Japaneseness:

Japan can raise the added value and competitiveness of its industries, even amid global competition, by directly and indirectly presenting the appeal of Japanese culture to the world, and by incorporating the elements of a ‘Cool Japan’ founded on a new industrial structure and lifestyles into its automobiles, electric appliances, daily goods and other products and services.

Initial efforts focused on foreign comic book and animation fans, who had started taking on the Japanese label of otaku (geeks) to identify themselves since the 1990s (Kelts 2007). The focus on foreign otaku initially had the effect of excluding female consumption (Miller 2011). However, since 2009, ‘Cool Japan’ events led by the cultural producer and writer Sakurai Takamasa, have specifically targeted female consumers in emerging markets like Russia, the United Arab Emirates, Brazil, Mexico, and (on many occasions) China. Sakurai also hosted an anime fan event in Johannesburg in 2012. The events are logistically supported by local embassies, but the focus falls on how Japan is enabling local fans to express themselves. Sakurai (2009) frequently characterises these events as people living their dreams and advancing the love between nations.

The return to power of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party in 2012 heralded changes in the Cool Japan campaign, which had faced resistance from the incumbent Democratic Party of Japan after the Fukushima earthquake and nuclear disaster. The Cool Japan campaign was extended to simultaneously boost cultural diplomacy and expand markets for Japanese goods, in the context of inter-ministerial cooperation. In the process the focus has come to fall on the role of Japanese culture in the self-definition of foreigners. Whereas the Ministry of Enterprise, Trade and Industry (METI) tends to see foreigners as potential consumers of Japanese products, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) sees their potential to carry messages of Japanese values into the world (Kishimori 2013).

In order to clarify this context, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Critical consumption studies in South Africa: roots and routes
• 1. Chewing on Japan: consumption, diplomacy and Kenny Kunene’s nyotaimori scandal
• 2. Agency and affordability: being black and ‘middle class’ in South Africa in 1989
• 3. Sartorial excess in Mary Sibande’s ‘Sophie’
• 4. Queer skin, straight masks: same-sex weddings and the discursive construction of identities and affects on a South African website
• 5. The promise of happiness: desire, attachment and freedom in post/apartheid South Africa
• 6. Retail, the service worker and the polity: attaching labour and consumption
• 7. Contradictions in consumer credit: innovations in South African super-exploitation
• 8. Trading in freedom: rethinking conspicuous consumption in post-apartheid political economy
• Index