Demystifying Post-Colonial Consumption and Markets

Post-colonial theory is a framework for understanding the complex relationship between the Global North and the Global South, which continues to shape contemporary discourses of identity, race, markets, and consumption. As an area of enquiry, post-colonial theory is devoted to revisiting and interrogating the colonial past to examine relationships of reciprocal antagonism and desire between the coloniser and the colonised. Post-colonial theory is not a unified framework of analysis, and the broad perspective of post-colonialism is applied in various ways. This seminar introduces some of the key ideas in post-colonial theory to help consumer/marketing researchers to interrogate the relationships of power that are taken for granted. In attending to post-colonial theory, the seminar does not rehash the emphasis on ethnic differences as is commonly done in the cultural turn of the discipline. Instead, it calls for an interrogation of deeper power structures that constitute articulations of markets and consumer subjectivity in marketing as a field.

While the seminar decenters the West as a universal referent for the creation and examination of non-Western subjectivities, it does not call for the abandonment of systemic understanding and emphasis on capitalism. To comprehend post-colonial consumption and markets, it is necessary to examine the logic of universals that capitalism creates, including accumulation, the extraction of surplus value, exploitation, class struggles, and alienation. Indeed, post-colonial theorisation must go beyond the narrow questions of race or nationalism and also consider the universal conditions of a capitalist world. Here, ‘universal’ does not mean ‘homogeneous’. Capital does not have to obliterate differences to universalise itself. It merely has to subordinate those dimensions of social reproduction that are essential to its own functioning. Thus, capitalist development takes the forms of the development of underdevelopment, maldevelopment, and dependent development in the post-colonial world.

This means that the multiple forms of unevenness in markets and consumption are to be understood as being connected, governed by a socio-historical logic of combination, rather than as being contingent and asystematic.