The spatial politics of chick lit in Africa and Asia: sidestepping tradition and fem-washing global capitalism?

Abstract

This article provides a spatial analysis of the types of microspaces, or Cultural Time Zones (CTZs), that constitute the narrative universes of chick lit from South Africa, China and India. I argue that although these books take place in ‘developing’ countries, their ‘First World’ spatial politics, and thus their political impact and cultural commentary, are both enabled and constrained by the settings of their narrative thrust. In the CTZ of the five-star hotel, or the elite spa, the books’ protagonists exemplify a popular notion of choice/neoliberal feminism. What, then, do they say about the possibility of feminism for confronting patriarchal traditions in CTZs like the ‘local’ neighbourhood? The three books analysed – Angela Makholwa’s Black Widow Society, Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby and Anita Jain’s Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India – are set in the globalising cities of Johannesburg, Shanghai and Delhi in putatively ‘developing’ countries; however, the books’ female protagonists tend to inhabit a series of ‘global’, ‘First World’ CTZs, like the high-end shopping mall, the Western music-playing nightclub or the cappuccino-serving cafe. These CTZs are geographically distant from those of their Western chick lit counterparts, yet nonetheless not very far away if measured in cultural kilometres. The neoliberal, so-called feminist ‘choices’ available to these protagonists would not be possible in geographically proximate but culturally distant, ‘traditional’ CTZs. The key question this article asks is whether these narratives’ spatial settings, confined as they are to upper middle-class, ‘global’, ‘modern’ CTZs, produce a form of spatial politics that fem-washes global capitalism while failing to confront patriarchal and traditional structures which dominate in more ‘local’, ‘traditional’ CTZs.

Introduction: Thirty Years of Borders Since Berlin

“…These (mega)city regions have been reshaped by globalization into complex, highly-texturized, immensely-variegated urbanscapes of divergent spatio-temporal microspaces, which I call Cultural Time Zones (CTZs). CTZs exist along a continuum from "traditional" to "modern," "local" to "global," "non-Western" to "Western" and so on, although none of these terms can adequately bear the weight of the reality they are supposed to invoke (see Myambo 2019aMyambo , 2019b. Different types of CTZs have different "cultural times" and thus demand different types of cultural capital (Bourdieu 2010(Bourdieu [1984)language(s), modes of dress, educational qualifications, aesthetic sensibilities and the like.…”