Food, malls and the politics of consumption: South Africa's new middle class

Abstract

Consumption has become a central focus in South African politics, one that hinges especially on evaluation of the behaviour of the new Black middle class.Based on an ongoing ethnographic study of Durban, mainly among the lower middle or "professional" class across a range of racial categories, the article addresses three aspects of this question: food provisioning and consumption across and within the various communities; interaction in shared social spaces that were previous segregated, especially shopping malls; and moral discourses in the media concerning this new class. The so-called 'Black diamonds' are a South African urban type of the sort labelled by Benjamin as a phantasmagoria. South Africans are willing to experiment beyond the boundaries of their native communities and there is an emergent national middle class culture, but there are marked regional differences and nothing yet that would amount to "creolisation".

Shuttling between the suburbs and the township: the new black middle class(es) negotiating class and post-apartheid blackness in South Africa

“…No rules discriminate against any race when it comes to dining at restaurants, although some of them have been accused in the media of discriminating against blacks through a racially skewed reservation system or as treating black patrons in racist ways 12 . Dining at restaurants in the suburbs, clearly still a white-dominated activity, is a consumer choice newly opened up to the black middle class despite having been ‘the preserve of whites not long ago’ (Chevalier 2015: 119).…”

The urban effects of the emerging middle class in the global south

“…The mall is not only a new consumption space, it also provides the setting for new forms of social interaction and social identity. New malls in South African cities for example are places of interaction in shared social spaces that were previously segregated (Chevalier, ). One study of a mall in Kazakhstan found it an important space for young people to see and be seen by others.…”

Varieties of Capitalists? The Middle–Class, Private Sector and Economic Outcomes in Africa

“…Most people probably understand the middle class as Aristotle did, that is, as a median stratum distinct from both the ‘very rich’ and from the ‘very poor’, comprising those ‘between them’. To quote one of Chevalier's middle class South African interviewees: ‘We are middle class because we are above the bread‐line… but we need to budget at the same time, we can't buy everything we want’ (Chevalier, , p. 125). What this means exactly and where the cut‐off point of each stratum is located can vary.…”