The Extratextuals

I now return to some early observations about Malawian media consumption, based on my research there in June:

One of my research goals was to interrogate the cultural imperialism thesis in a developing country.

Being a non-American who grew up watching huge amounts of American television, and whose non-American friends are mostly in the same boat, I’ve always found the cultural imperialism thesis to have considerable intellectual purchase, but only to a point, whereas many of its proponents take it beyond that point to the offensive extreme of imagining that all us non-Americans are so devoid of cultural roots, so easily swayed by images of Pamela Anderson (a Canadian, for the record) running across a beach in a swimsuit, and so ready for foreign programming (in all the senses of that word) that Americanization occurs easily and unproblematically. I worry that American companies hold many a media outlet’s purse-strings, I worry that resulting economies of scale make it easier for American saturation of media outlets than to develop local content that tells local stories, I worry that many of my country’s best actors are poached by Hollywood, and I’m aware that despite George Bush’s best efforts to undo its work, American PR is so much louder and better than most other nations’. So by no means do I consider cultural imperialism a mere bogeyman in the closet. But I also believe in the complexity and sophistication of audiences, and the complexity and sophistication of various national cultures enough to resist the simplicity and clumsiness of a pure cultural imperialism thesis.   More after the fold …

Beyond resisting the cultural imperialism thesis due to beliefs about the audience, though, I also believe that the thesis relies on a very unhelpful, Adornoesque notion of popular culture. If we’re to believe that American content is turning the world American, this presumes a remarkable consistency in American content’s notion of what “America” or “American” mean. To posit all American texts as selling a pro-American stance is already problematic (Jerry Springer, South Park, most MTV reality shows, and Michael Moore’s global popularity immediately pose themselves as problems here). But even if we assumed that all American texts sell America, who is to say what that America is? Surely Oprah’s America is not the same as J. J. Abrams’s, Miley Cyrus’s, Bill O’Reilly’s, Steven Spielberg’s, Kanye West’s, Katie Couric’s, Jon Stewart’s, or Toby Keith’s. They may have similarities and points of crossover, of course, but they also have key differences. When the bulk of these differences are exported, it poses a real challenge to scholars of international media flows: which messages resonate? Which Americas sell, how, where, and why?

Malawi proved fascinating in light of these questions. Some American texts that are popular in America are popular there. Some that have long since become uncool here are popular there. Some that are seen as “girl’s” music here have wide masculine appeal there. Some that are seen as lower class here are upper class there. Some that hold court here are completely irrelevant there. The cultural flow between the two countries, then, is remarkably uneven, in terms of genre, temporality, and centrality. Hence, some people I met loved cutting edge, of-the-moment rap and hip-hop, while also being diehard fans of Steven Seagal movies and of Michael Bolton. While the cultural imperialism thesis has an economic component too (more on that briefly), if we consider just its textual component – the idea that American texts sell American popular culture – what we see in Malawi is a massive proliferation of American popular cultures. So, yes, American popular culture was often prevalent, but there were different American popular cultures. Black pride, in particular, was obvious and explicit in numerous respondents’ discussion of which movie stars and musicians they enjoyed. Recent film was almost nowhere to be seen, meanwhile, meaning that if any messages regarding what’s cool were being taken away from the films, they were messages of what was cool in the eighties and early nineties. Culture is not just about what’s cool, but when coolness hovers over different elements of American culture in the US than in Malawi, how easily can we say that the latter is copying and/or learning from the former?

At times, when Malawians talked of Americans and American media, this America sounded as though it was something like the world of a Pixar film is to me, in that there are obvious references to reality, characters that are meant to be realistic, and countless jokes and references that assume a fair degree of familiarity with pop cultural realities … and yet it’s an odd, categorically different entity. A spectacle, yes, but how much of it works as a model? I still need to get deeper into my audience data before answering this better, and even then, I don’t pretend to think that this data will give me any definitive answers. But America may look something like Finding Nemo.

As for the economic component of cultural imperialism, if the fear is that American media corporations will enjoy a stranglehold over media circulation, this fear was largely unfounded for Malawian music and film. Film and music moved almost exclusively through piracy. This piracy definitely hurt local acts’ viability, thereby jeopardizing the development of Malawian film or music. But it also ensures that Hollywood and the Western recording industry make next to no money from film or music in Malawi. If somebody is listening to Dolly or Eminem, or watching Schwarzenegger or Stallone, the only people making money are Malawians, with the lone exception of the original purchases that enable the piracy. And while I completely ascribe to the Piracy Begets Demand school of thought, realizing that, in the West and in more developed countries, piracy may make it possible for Western companies to come in and capitalize on demand, no such possibility exists as yet in Malawi, due to the pittance of an income that most Malawians make (ie: if AMC set up a theatre or fifty, or if Virgin Megastores opened in Rumphi and Liwonde, the vast majority of Malawians couldn’t afford to visit, ensuring the continued livelihood and centrality of the pirate economy). The difference in temporal flows also challenges any would-be entrepreneur’s establishment of a legitimate market, since Malawians exhibited little obsession with getting into what’s “new” and hip – when Phil Collins has as big a fan base as Beyonce, and way bigger than Coldplay, getting Malawians to buy into a legitimate market for music would require not only a substantial rise in income levels, but also a change in culture that sees Malawians hunger for what’s new. Coolness is often linked with the new or with cycles (of retro cool) in the West, but if coolness and newness are as separated in Malawi as they appeared to be at times, or at least if there is a relative sense of timing involved in what is “new,” newness can’t drive the consumer economy in the same way.

Television is a different issue, since Malawian and foreign television stations must still pay Hollywood, so economic cultural imperialism is probably alive on that front, though issues of newness are still in play, taking some edge off it.

I don’t mean to suggest by all of the above, that Malawi is wholly representative of the world. In many ways it is not, since it is poorer than almost every other country in the world, thereby making financial gain of any sort relative, and hence the economic spoils of cultural imperialism are moot in Malawi to a degree that is admittedly unusual. Malawian income levels also make migration or travel to America or to anywhere but neighboring countries rare, thereby making America more a state of mind and an idea (a Pixar film?) than it is to some others. Furthermore, since the state of Malawi’s economy attracts little interest from Western corporations or countries, any media-inspired images of America will hardly inform real-life political or economic interactions with America, since Malawians have very few such interactions. However, Malawi is not alone in such details.

As should be clear, these are all ideas in progress, or, rather, in chaos. So please challenge, contest, ask, theorize, hypothesize, and/or dismiss accordingly.

Malawi cultural imperialism, Malawi