Consumption, Media and the Global South

Aspiration Contested

Mehita Iqani

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781349557011
  9781137390127
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137390134
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Social Sciences

What does consumption in the global south signify, and how are its complexities communicated in media discourses? This book looks at the media representation of consumer culture in Africa, China, Brazil and India through case studies ranging from celebrity selfies, to travel websites, news reports and documentary film.

1

Introduction: The Mediation of Global South Consumption

In the age of globalization, consumer culture is linked inextricably with neoliberalism. The majority of countries in the world have been historically and systemically excluded from the prosperity brought about by the globalized economic and financial system spawned by western colonialism and imperialism. Yet thanks to globalized media systems, those countries and their populations – the majority of which remain trapped in poverty – are exposed to knowledge about the commodities, consumption practices and individualistic values that their more economically privileged counterparts enjoy. This inherent paradox – the extreme visibility of consumer culture in global media discourses and the deprivation of all but the most basic material opportunities to most of the 7 billion people living on the planet – is the driving force behind this book. What does it mean that consumption is so visible in global media, yet despite economic growth and westernization, it is still so difficult to access for many people? This is a question of material resources and their distribution, true, but it is also a question about discourse: the stories that we tell ourselves and each other about the world and how it operates, and the relationships that we are invited to forge by the narratives and ideas that circulate through the media.

This book is concerned with representations, discourses and media narratives about consumption in the global south. It explores themes of tourism, celebrity, yuppie lifestyles and political corruption in relation to consumption. These discourses are not disconnected from the measurable realities of social life, international politics or global economics but are in fact intricately enmeshed with them. Our notion of reality itself is crystallized through the messages, ideas, values and images that are inscribed and recorded through a variety of media forms. Ideas about consumption in the global south are to a significant extent produced and constructed by media representations of consumption there. It is therefore important to pay attention to those representations and to map out and trace the versions of reality that are produced by media discourses; this is the aim of this book. By critically discussing a carefully selected number of cases of media representation of global south consumption, this book contributes to broader debates about media and consumer culture beyond the parameters of the west and shows how material culture is intertwined with bigger political issues, such as the cultural geopolitics of race and gender, enduring schisms between wealth and poverty, and ideological debates about equality and empowerment. The book puts various case studies from South Africa – my home country and research base – into dialogue with related case studies from other key nodes in the global south, including Brazil, India, China and other African contexts. The themes that will be explored through these case studies are organized into chapters that deal with slum tourism, celebrity, corrupt politicians and the middle-class imaginary. Each analytical chapter (3–6) introduces carefully selected case studies that serve as discursive nodal points that articulate contradictory meanings about consumption, aspiration and empowerment in the global south. These are bookended by theoretical chapters, the first (Chapter 2) drawing on established scholarship on consumption and the global south to lay down key theoretical foundations for the analytical chapters, and the last (Chapter 7) pulling together the various analytical themes in each chapter to make an argument about how the mediation of consumption is an active social site for the contestation of aspiration and empowerment (hence the subtitle of the book).

The global south: Experimental term, analytical opportunity

Before moving on to introduce the case studies, it is necessary to pause in order to engage with a term which although prickly in its trendiness and complexity is one of the key organizing themes of the book, and which has been very purposefully included in its title: the global south. What does it mean, to whom and how has it been debated? What are its strengths and weaknesses, and how will it be used here? As will become clear, it is not deployed in absolute terms but rather as a point of fissure and contradiction in which the complexities of global cultural exchange, intersection and representation can be fruitfully explored (Hofmeyr, 2014). I engage the term “global south” in the spirit of “disposable theory” (Castells, 2000: 6): in this book I wish to make an argument for the importance of the idea in thinking about consumption now, but emphasize how it is “still in its exploratory stage, and should remain, like all relevant theories, as a work in progress open to rectification by empirical research” (Castells, 2000: 6).

One of the core inspiring impulses for this book was a sense that although consumption has been much studied from the perspective of the west, its study in “the rest” appears to have remained limited to anthropology and economics. With an awareness of the power of global media flows and conjunctures, and of rising discourses about the growing economic power of non-western nations, it seems crucial to turn the “map” of research about consumption upside down, to pay attention also to the narratives about consumption which are at the margins, although linked to, those economic and mediated processes of globalization. Broadly speaking, this book is concerned with how material culture and consumption are represented in societies, cultures and contexts that were historically exploited by and are now asymmetrically interdependent with the hegemonic cultural and economic matrices of the western world. Following the Comaroffs, I use “global south” as shorthand for the “world of non-European, postcolonial peoples” (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012: 113), but I do depart from them in terms of the grandiose order of theory about modernity to which they lay claim, as well as their overemphasis on poverty as a central feature of the global south. As this book will show, the global south is also characterized by middle-class and elite consumption practices, and is shaped by wealth as well as destitution – as is argued in the case of studying consumption in Latin America (Sinclair and Pertierra, 2012: 4).

My use of the term “global south” is intended to summarize certain empirical commonalities, to capture the other side of western binary in an affirming vocabulary that does not depart only from a position of deficiency (as does the term, non-west, for example), that “speaks back” by bringing together into one analytical project some of the cross-cutting flows and tensions relevant to contexts in Asia, Africa and Latin America without homogenizing their disparate and unique characteristics. Precisely due to its experimental, contradictory nature (Hofmeyr, 2014), “global south” is the most fertile term available for the description of what has otherwise been named the “underdeveloped”, “developing”, “post-colonial”, “third” and “non-western” world. This book will often refer to the “global south” partly to reference these terms but mostly to disrupt and displace them. It is used as a conceptual apparatus, a heuristic device for “dis/ordering” (Levander and Mignolo, 2011) scholarly work on consumption from a comparative and transnational perspective. The “global south” is a metaphor aimed at overcoming binaries, which points to rather than ignores the slippery intersections between states otherwise polarized as “northern” or “southern”. When I use the adjective “southern” (paired with, for example, “consumption”), it is as a short-hand for discussing the consumption practices of individuals and groups who are ethnically, culturally, politically or economically linked to global south contexts, where “global south” is read as signifying rupture, fissure and experimentation (Hofmeyr, 2014) rather than only one side of a fixed analytical binary. Following Isabel Hofmeyr (2014), I prefer to utilize a non-capitalized version of the “global south”. Drawing on a spirit of non-alignment (in a more literal sense of being out of line rather than the institutional, nostalgic connotations of the Non-Aligned Movement), refusing to capitalize the “global south” indicates a move away from the politicized, wistful vocabulary of “third-world” multilateral elites and towards a vocabulary that can grapple with the emergent and “mutant” forms of culture emanating from transnational links between southern contexts (Hofmeyr, 2014). This book will explore some of these discursive links at a number of different levels of status and mediation.

The term “global south” signals a complex and dynamic vocabulary for speaking about certain similarities in cultures, economics and political histories in contexts outside the historically privileged metropoles of the US and Europe (Prashad, 2014). There have been many homogenizing concepts which have been coined to describe this formation of cultures “outside” (neo)colonial, western power. During colonialism, it was termed “the empire” or “the colonies”. An elaborate distinction was made between civilized and uncivilized nations, with the latter variously categorized as savage, backwards, barbarian, primitive, native, tribalist and so on (Mbembé, 2001). During post-colonialism and the Cold War, scholars and commentators spoke of the “third world”, which supposedly stood between the first (capitalist) and second (communist) worlds (Dodds, 2014). With the rise of development theory came a new set of binaries: the developed and the underdeveloped world, and later, only slightly more politically correctly, the “developing” world (Craggs, 2014; Porter and Faust, 2009; Schuurman, 2014). A relatively new set of ideas has emerged in opposition to these very problematic concepts which binarize any context outside the US and Europe as “non”-something: arguments that the “south” is a new location for theory, not only a site for research by western and westernized scholars (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012; Connell, 2007; Hofmeyr, 2007; Mbembé, 2002). The idea of theory from the south deserves an attitude of cautious optimism. It is indeed necessary to conceptualize the complexities of culture (and in the case of the specific interest in this book, of globalized consumption) in non-western contexts without having to rely so heavily on the binary of west/non-west in the first place. The south seems a more progressive and politically nuanced possibility for at once celebrating the renewal of scholarly energy emanating from the “margins” and making a powerful claim for the recentring of those margins to their rightful place alongside, as equals, ideas and research from elsewhere. At the same time, the notion of the south manages to capture the histories of exploitation and structurally produced inequality (most profoundly enacted through colonialism), which fundamentally shaped and defined the current complexities and challenges faced by post-colonial societies.

It is necessary to pay attention also to the “global” part of the “global south”. Political, economic and cultural processes of globalization have created more interconnectedness across national boundaries than ever before (as discussed further in Chapter 2). Media and cultural configurations are inherently transnational, and consumption is one important set of processes through which globalization is inscribed. Historically, colonialism and the formation of the global economy were based largely on material linkages – accessing, extracting and exporting resources, and creating markets for the import of surplus commodities created by the industrialized west but also on certain culturally contextualized demands from the south (Prestholdt, 2004, 2007, 2009). Globalized consumption – both linked to production in its modernist, colonial form and delinked from production in its post-modern, post-colonial form – is not new. Histories of key commodities, such as soap (Burke, 1996; McClintock, 2013) and sugar (Mintz, 1986), show how the production, distribution and marketing of those commodities were tied in very tightly to imperialist (racist) power structures. The legacies of those histories are arguably still present in contemporary consumerist formations. The term “global south” integrates an acknowledgement of the shared colonial histories of Asia, Africa and Latin America, and also points to other processes that have forged connectivity between those continents, and from those continents to historical centres of power. Appending the notion “global” to “south” brings in a number of new and important dimensions, and firmly roots the concept in the present. While “south” signals towards historic legacies, “global” signals towards current (and future) modes of connection and flow between cultures and nations. Although China, India, Brazil and South Africa’s experiences of colonial oppression were diverse and are impossible to conflate, that they all share that history of racist oppression is notable and functions, possibly, as at least one basis on which common understandings and shared interests might be based. The global south is full of contradictions: a culturalist, consumption-centric approach seeks to explore and elucidate some of those contradictions rather than solve them.

The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) political formation has received a great deal of attention in many scholarly disciplines, including media studies (Thussu and Nordenstreng, 2015), and although the emergence of this power formation is by no means the central focus of this book, a brief discussion of the political basis for the growing economic alliance is useful in contextualizing the overall theme of the book in relation to debates about the “global south”. Arguments about a new “new world order” emerging from the “south” and “east”, but basically dominated by the economic might of China, have been circulating since at least 2003 (Armijo, 2007; Mansfield, 2014; Sharma, 2012). BRICS is a political alliance between the governments of the so-called new economic superpowers. China is projected to overtake the US in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) within a decade (Tabassum and Ahmed, 2014), and the economies of Russia, Brazil and India are likewise predicted to grow substantially over the same period. South Africa is not as good a fit with the BRICS economic growth model as it would like to think – its GDP is puny in comparison with China’s (although China has been increasingly investing in a number of African states as a strategy to access the wealth of mineral resources that the continent contains) (Boulle and Chella, 2014). That this book is neither about BRICS nor conceptuality organized around it will be apparent in the exclusion of any Russian case study, and the inclusion of examples linked to Nigeria, Cameroon and Kenya. Like many political formations, the idea of BRICS (or a capitalized Global South) is likely to have its particular era, and it might well give way to other alliances and political-economic structures of cooperation and exchange as political interests and global power plays shift and evolve. Although BRICS is somehow related to the idea of the global south, it is not employed as a conceptual basis for this book, nor is it used as a synonym or stand-in for “global south”.

There are many ways to try to do comparative research on the global south. One is through economic data (which is the big trend in BRICS econometrics), such as that supplied on the World Bank website, updated annually. What are nations’ GDPs and what are their average per capita incomes? Tellingly, here, all the countries in the BRICS group and in the global south in general have very low per capita incomes even when their GDPs look impressive – bluntly translated, this means that they are poor countries in that the majority of their citizens have very little individual economic agency. In contrast, countries in the west have higher per capita incomes, even when they have lower GDPs, which means that on the ground and in everyday life, more individual people and families have greater disposable income and economic agency than do individuals and families in the global south. One thing that is therefore commonly associated with the global south is poverty. However, as this book will show, the global south is a place not only of poverty but also of middle-class and elite wealth, and a huge variety of cultural expressions organized around ideas of aspiration, social mobility, luxury and leisure that, although not cancelling out narratives of poverty, deserve to be considered alongside them.

The global south should be considered an indicator of neither geography nor poverty. It does not refer only to countries that are situated to the south of the equator, nor those that exist in states of absolute poverty. It refers to continents, countries and cultures that were historically interlinked with western power by imperialism yet whose populations did not profit as uniformly from colonial exploitation and its legacies, and where poverty, social ills and inequality are acutely visible in counterpoint with pockets of wealth, privilege and “development”. It has been argued that the global south is a theoretically productive concept because it can help to explain how “Euro-America is evolving towards Africa” (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012). This argument positions the global north (summarized as Euro-America) and the global south at opposite ends of a clearly delineated binary. Although binaries are often useful to think with, the global north and south should not be considered completely mutually exclusive entities. There are, of course, exclusive shopping malls in the global south, just as there are homeless and squat settlements in the north. There are luxury motor vehicles in the south, just as there are malnourished children in the north. The complex interplay of northern and southern features across both the global north and the global south is to some extent erased by a binary phraseology. Its utilization in this book is not intended to reiterate that erasure but to try to shine a spotlight, where possible, on precisely those complexities and incoherencies signalled by the phrase “global south”, in order to contribute to a fuller picture of the cultural politics of global material inequality.

In this book the term “global south” is used in a “non-aligned”, nuanced way, with full recognition of the complexities and debates attached to it. It is deployed neither as an economic category nor as a geopolitical indicator. It is intended to function neither as an eliminating concept nor as one that homogenizes massive diversities and complexities into one all-consuming narrative. Instead, it is harnessed as an “experimental term” (Hofmeyr, 2014) that is promising precisely because of its openness and the ways in which it can be diversely utilized. It allows for the signalling of links and similarities, as well as pointing towards, in the context of globalization, how forms of culture (e.g. consumption), which although special and unique in each iteration, are also to some extent globally shared and reproduced through a variety of formations of power. The term “non-western” is diminutive and Otherizing in a most violent and erasing way. The term “developing”, or “underdeveloped”, is not only patronizing and subservient to a linear, deterministic developmentalist attitude but is also patently not true when considering the levels of industrial sophistication present in countries such as China, India and Brazil, and the levels of consumer innovation in almost every context imaginable (and considering how dependent the so-called “developed” nations are on production in China and elsewhere in Asia to maintain western consumer lifestyles). Post-independence is slightly more useful, but the term seems at once a little outdated and limiting: calling up the Bandung Conference era and failing to attend to the cultural and geopolitical complexities of the new millennium. The term “post-colonial” is also a little too broad: having been occupied and commercially exploited by a European power at some point in history is an important event that fundamentally shapes many southern societies, but Australia and the US were both colonized, and they are both clearly not in any way part of the “global south” as defined by any other factors.

The term “global south” can be criticized for being too vague, too fuzzy, too homogenizing and too reliant on a binary opposition with the north. Complaints could be made that the term tries to do too much, in terms of summarizing the characteristics of entire geographical and cultural swathes of the world, or that it tries to do too little, in that it oversimplifies and tries to crudely unclutter complex modes of connectivity and comparison. It can be criticized for being too futuristic, in that it overenthusiastically hails a new regime of power that has not yet been established and might not be at all, or too caught up in the past, in that it is nostalgic for the now displaced and deflated ethic of the short-lived Non-Aligned Movement of the Cold War era. All of these criticisms are acknowledged, as explicitly as possible but often implicitly, in the conceptual work done in the chapters that follow. My use of the term is in the spirit of experimentation, exploration and disposability. It does not ignore or erase these valid criticisms, but works with them in the spirit of disjuncture and provocation, in order to map out some of the linkages, discursive flows, fissures and cultural parallels between otherwise unique contexts and case studies in order to contribute to critical discussions about what consumption means in contexts and cultures at the margins of mainstream (western) scholarship on consumer culture. By so doing, this book introduces a new set of perspectives about how transnational media discourse analyses might help to map out an idea of the global south, as well as how it is produced and deployed in the context of globalized consumer culture.

Transnational comparative case studies: Challenges and prospects

In media and communications research, cross-national research is increasing in importance as well as complexity. There are many arguments for and against transnational comparative approaches, which are deftly summed up by Sonia Livingstone (2003). Like communication, consumption does not “respect national boundaries”...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgement
• List of Acronyms
• 1. Introduction: The Mediation of Global South Consumption
• 2. Globalization, Consumption and Power: Why Media Matter
• 3. Slum Tourism and the Consumption of Poverty in TripAdvisor Reviews: The Cases of Langa, Dharavi and Santa Marta
• 4. New Yuppies? Documentary Film Representations of Middle-Class Consumer Lifestyles in China and South Africa
• 5. Allegations of Consumption: Wealth and Luxury in News Reports of Corruption in South Africa and India
• 6. Celebrity Skin: Race, Gender and the Politics of Feminine Beauty in Celebrity Selfies
• 7. Contesting Aspiration: Equality, Empowerment and Media Narratives about Consumption
• Works Cited
• Index