African luxury: aesthetics and politics

Abstract

Some might assume that the phrase ' African luxury' is an oxymoron, certainly not considering the notion that Africans are the consumers of said luxury. At the time of writing, entering the search keywords ' Africa' and 'luxury' into Google Scholar resulted not in scholarly work that engaged critically, or indeed otherwise, with how luxury consumer cultures play out in African settings, but rather in numerous articles that use the idea of 'luxury' as a rhetorical device to ask whether certain developmental needs are necessities or 'nice-to-haves' for Africans. For example, one question raised is whether the availability of adolescent psychiatry is a 'luxury' for African communities (Robertson et al. 2010), and it is also considered how, in certain Aids-stricken African contexts, it might be a 'luxury' to grieve for loved ones lost to the disease (Demmer 2007).While there is extensive scholarship examining various aspects of contemporary consumer cultures and identities in Africa, including those of elite actors and demographics (Dosekun 2020; Huigen 2017;Iqani 2015) and those centred on expensive goods -and indeed their symbolic destruction, in the case of the South African township culture, izikhotane (Howell and Vincent 2014) -'luxury' has been little considered as a distinct category thus far, moreover as distinct from 'conspicuous consumption' . Some attention to luxury can be found in work on other global south 1 locations -often, tellingly, more in relation to so-called 'new' middle classes than the 'elites' or 'super-elites' of concern in the global North (Brosius 2012;Fernandes 2006; Lange and Meier 2009;Southall 2016). There is, for example, work on luxury accommodation in gated communities in Bangalore, India (Upadhya 2009); on the growing popularity of luxury golf courses in China (Zhang et al. 2009); and on middle-class Thai consumers' savvy expenditure on affordable 'fast fashion' , complemented with 'substantial investments in expensive western branded goods -a Prada bag, a pair of Gucci sunglasses' , which gives them entry into elite consumer spaces, and which are often resold or traded at 'luxury goods exchanges' (Arvidsson and Niessen 2015: 9; Wattanasuwan 1999). At the same time, in both the larger and more established body of scholarship on luxury from business, marketing and management studies (Cavender and Kincade 2014;Dubois and Duquesne 1993; Kapferer and Bastien 2012; Truong et al. 2008), and in the emergent field of critical luxury studies concerned with the cultural and other politics of what is contemporarily deemed luxury (Armitage and Roberts 2016; Featherstone 2014), the focus is almost exclusively on the global North.African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics emerges from, and begins to fill, these multi-faceted gaps. With original case studies spanning the continent, from Togo to the former Zaire to Angola, the book moves beyond predominant imaginaries of Africa as a place to be 'saved' or 'aided' , as well as more recent, teleological formulations of it as 'rising' , to foreground a...