Neoliberal Leveraging of the Colonial Imagination: A Global South Reading of Tobacco Ads in Africa

ABSTRACT

Africa’s portrayal in the hegemonic imagination has been subjected to critical analysis for many decades. Three features stand out in my analysis. First, I focus on how that hegemonic imagination produces and correlates whiteness to progress through cigarette marketing. Second, I am concerned with the specifically neoliberal leveraging of the imaginary repertoire of classic European colonialism. Neoliberal colonialism repurposes old phantasmagoria according to its own modes of dominance and exploitation, engaging in a form of racialisation that is much more subtle but equally effective. Third, I use my own situated reading from elsewhere in the periphery to triangulate and break open the classic dichotomic opposition between Africa and the West. In supplanting the Africa/West dichotomy with a tripartite division of the world as analytical category, new ways in which the hegemonic idea of Africa benefits neoliberal colonialism surface. Working classes globally are driven to read their exploitation as a comparative privilege, while comprador elites are disciplined into cooperation and compliance. These ideas are investigated by means of visual analyses of tobacco ads in Africa. I focus on how youths are lured into global economic and semiotic value circuits to produce the spectacular and spectral normativity of a whitened global bourgeoisie.

KEYWORDS:

• image of Africa
• Global South
• neoliberal
• ideology
• tobacco advertising
• spectacle
• spectrality
• production of whiteness

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ingrid Fugellie for her feedback and revision of early drafts.

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was declared by the author.

Notes

1 In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney (1972) analyses how colonialism destroyed subsistence farming and local food trading circuits to favour cash crops for export (including tobacco). Staple food shortages were generated and soils eroded, producing landslides, droughts, and destabilising ecosystems more generally. This created dependency on European imports for basic subsistence while providing Europe with the prime materials necessary for its own industrial flourishment. The neoliberal colonialism that settled in after Rodney’s classic was published only came to further that structural dependency. Nile Bowie (2012) analyses how the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund deliberately dismember the self-sufficiency of local economies to ensure their dependency on world markets:

Food aid to sub-Saharan Africa has increased more than seven times since 1974 and commercial grain imports have flooded local markets […]. Financial institutions apply debilitating restructuring to the economies of borrower countries to effectively turn them into breadbaskets for cash crops and other money harvests, using the highest quality farmlands available to cultivate tobacco crops for export, […] their shameless pursuit of turning a profit has led the World Bank to trumpet the commoditization of water, which does nothing but actively contribute to food insecurity and famine in arid climates.

Bowie also argues that proxy wars played out in Africa during the Cold War, such as the Ethio-Somali war of 1977 to 1978, crippled local economies, populations, and adequate land-use, setting the conditions for the subsequent food crises in the region. Alexander de Waal and Human Rights Watch (1991) also elaborate at length on this last point with reference to Ethiopia.

2 See also Nadia Collot (2005, minute 78–85) and Alison Pinkney (2008).

3 For my usage of ‘neoliberal colonialism’ see José Gandarilla (2018) and Aroch-Fugellie (2023).

4 Although tobacco production in Africa is considerable, it is dominated either by transnational companies directly or through subsidiary brands, with very few local brand exceptions, especially in sub-Saharan Africa north of South Africa (see Tobacco Tactics 2022; Vellios, Ross & Perucic 2018). It is to that majority market, its advertising strategies, and how they map out centre-periphery relations that I dedicate my attention here.

5 Mark Fisher’s 2013 ‘Exiting the Vampire Castle’ is a classic critique of such contradictions in the moralising modalities of contemporary liberalism.

6 In Africa today mining and oil sites are set up as capital-intensive extractive enclaves, walled-off and isolated from the rest of the economy, sometimes even guarded by paramilitary forces. ‘The rest – the vast terrain of “unusable” Africa – gets increasingly nongovernmental states […] open to banditry and warlordism’ (Ferguson 2006, 39, see also 34–38).

7 The giving hand as rhetorical devise is also interesting in view of Jacques Derrida’s (1992) analysis of tobacco as a radical gift that breaks away from capitalism’s logic of exchange. Here, however, tobacco is appropriated by capitalism as what Giorgio Agamben (2009) calls an apparatus.

8 While Southeast Asia is beyond my scope here, it is also a growing market for big tobacco, as fetishised most prominently by social (and other) media in the form of Aldi Suganda, a two-year-old chain smoker from Indonesia.

9 While proliferating in the 1970s, ‘underdevelopment’ and its cognates are now politically incorrect. Nonetheless, I lean here on the metaphor because it continues to operate in the hegemonic global imagination. The veto on the term next to economic policies that continue to place Africa at a disadvantage does not solve the problem. It may actually reinforce it since, in treating the symptom, the eradication of the malady is simulated and persisting causes ignored. Nowhere is this clearer than in the World Bank’s decision to eliminate the term ‘developing country’ from its vocabulary while continuing to enforce structural adjustment programmes on those countries it programmatically exploits yet now refers to by another name (see Fernholz 2016). That is simply what I call fetishism of the signifier (see Aroch-Fugellie 2015, 41–78).

10 See Richard Klein’s (1994) book-length cultural analysis of smoking as sublime.

11 Judith Butler (2009) elaborates on the performatic force acquired by images in mass-mediatic circulation, independently of the original intention of producers.

12 The complicities between the tobacco industry and the neoliberal advance become personified in the figure of Justice Powell who, after representing the American Tobacco Institute and its pseudoscientific rebuttal of tobacco’s hazardous effects wrote a memo in 1971 now known as neoliberalism’s birth certificate. See David Harvey (2016).

13 Adam Curtis’s (2002) documentary historicises this shift in consumer capitalism, concentrating on the incorporation of psychoanalytic theory into marketing strategies, and on the appropriation of the synergies of the suffragette movement by sales strategists of tobacco companies in the 1920s.

14 That preoccupation with the body is correlative to the decorporealisation of personal and professional relations as a result of the proliferation of new technologies. Regarding the corporeal turn see V.V. Zhura and Yulia Rudova (2017).

15 Pinkney (2008) documents children’s usage of cigarettes as substitutes for food (see also Collot 2005, minute 84).

16 On the relationship between shame and addiction, see Pia Mellody (2003). On the secret of the commodity fetish see Marx (1990, 163–177).

17 The New International Division of Labour emerges in the 1970s, marking new conditions under which the valorisation of capital takes place (Fröbel, Heinrichs & Kreye 1989). The spreading and cheapening of communication and transport technologies in the 1960s made it more cost-efficient to manufacture in a series of partial operations in the periphery where cheap labour now outweighed increased transportation and logistics costs. Production was outsourced to a series of assembly plants across the globe. In this scenario, it is important to consider not only the places where such plants are de facto located, but other peripheral sites where they are not, for those sustain the conditions that give shape to the overall structure.

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Paulina Aroch-Fugellie

Paulina Aroch-Fugellie engages in the critique of ideology from a Global South perspective, especially from Africa and Latin America. Her work is informed by contemporary critical theories from the Global South, the dialectics of the Frankfurt School, and the ‘travelling concepts’ methodology in which she was trained at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. She combines the tools of cultural and discourse analysis, psychoanalytic theory, political economy, performance studies, postcolonial and decolonial critique. She is former Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, now Professor at the Humanities Department, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – Cuajimalpa, in Mexico City, and CONAHCYT National Researcher II.