Trading in freedom: rethinking conspicuous consumption in post-apartheid political economy

Abstract

This article investigates some accounts of conspicuous consumption in South Africa, tracing their variously linear, circular and disjunctive paths, identifying and explaining some methodological impasses, and concluding with reflections on the interrelation between distinct armatures of value and exchange. The first kind of trajectory that impinges in looking at accounts of conspicuous consumption post-apartheid is a linear one, indicating the direction ‘up from’ and ‘out of’ racially based discrimination and oppression structuring sumptuary regulations. With regard to this trajectory, I will show that this is not as linear as it may initially appear, proceeding from apartheid to its ‘post-’, but that it is indicated both in the liberation movement's programmatics and in the aspirationalism mobilised by advertising and marketing strategies at an earlier stage. In considering the association of freedom with de-regulated consumption, a circularity emerges, in relation to which I would like to posit, for purposes of critical analysis, distinct forms of exchange implicit in the contexts described for the emergence of a new ‘middle class’ at a specific conjuncture, to then spell out some of their complex interrelations and dynamics.