You have money, you enjoy life: The politics and perplexities of consumerist cultures in Africa

Simidele Dosekun, lecturer in media and cultural studies at the University of Sussex will present seminar on consumption.

This is the 8^th seminar in the Mellon 30th Anniversary Seminar Series, Mapping African Futures. The seminar maps the logics of various cases of consumerism in Africa, and of the ready concerns if not relative moral panics that these cases engender. Motivated by an ongoing tension in her own research between asserting the fact and un-exceptionality of Africans’ ardent participation in the world of things without lapsing into celebration or relinquishing critique, this seminar reflects on how consumption in Africa ‘makes sense’ but also perplexes, and reflects on how we can problematise it without taking a moralised or disciplinary view of what it is that Africans should be doing or desiring instead.

The seminar will be chaired by Associate Professor Mehita Iqani.

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