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.

Music is all over the place. A lot of villages don’t have wired electricity, but batteries can do a lot in Malawi, and radios are pervasive. The country has several radio stations, and picks up others from neighboring countries. Beyond this, tapes are alive and well in Malawi, with many music stalls selling tapes before all other formats. CDs exist, though CD players were nowhere near as pervasive, and when I gave a friend a CD that my wife and I gave away at our wedding, he was very confused about how to make it work, suggesting that the technology is still largely for the wealthy. VCDs, interestingly, were almost as popular, since they carried videos of the performers. And discs with mp3s were better currency in many situations, as mp3 players seemed more plentiful than CD players.

As with film, much of what sells is pirated. CDs cost more than some people make in two weeks, so pirating is a necessity for many. One hardly feels for Eminem or Usher when one sees them pirated, but it is worth noting the really harmful effect this has on local acts. Newspaper articles often discussed the lousy economics of being a musician in Malawi, and indeed, one of the interviewers working for a Penn project in Malawi was a well-known Malawian musician whose videos had been on television … yet he still worked as an interviewer for about $10 a day to make ends meet. Moreover, given that Chichewa is a fairly localized language (shared only with Zambia), Malawian music struggles to get play outside of the country, meaning that the market is too small to reward its best artists.

More after the fold …

What’s playing, though? First, reggae is big. A fair deal of Malawian music is reggae, or reggae-ish. Despite the piracy and ensuing economics of being an artist, it’s really good too. I was frequently struck by the high quality of the music, even if performed and recorded in a set-up that I could have beat with the synthesizer that I owned in the 80s. Grab me at a conference or something when I have my laptop, and I’ll gladly play you some.

Whereas Christian music is an almost completely segregated music form in the USA, there’s not much of this division in Malawi. One of the bigger radio stations is Christian, but its songs are listened to by many (even several Muslim listeners I talked to really dug some of the Christian songs), and many of the artists who do Christian music also do non-Christian.

There’s also a lot of music from bordering or nearby countries, such as Zambia, Kenya, and South Africa (especially the latter, given its relative wealth). And any other reggae is common, with Bob Marley featuring prominently.

After that, it’s an eclectic mix of an average day in the Bronx, an average day in the Appalachians, and an average high school dance in the 80s.

Rap and hip hop are very popular, especially with younger Malawians. African-American artists enjoy particular success, with 50 Cent, Tupaq, Snoop Dogg, and so forth making regular appearances in song queues. R&B is very popular too. Someone keenly asked my wife if she was friends with Mariah Carey (for the record, she is not). Toni Braxton, Usher, R. Kelly, Rihanna, and Beyonce are heard all over the place.

Oddly, though, while these genres are all fairly up to date, or at least only a year behind, nothing else seems of the last 10 years. Easy listening (and cheesy 80s easy listening at that. Think “Lady in Red” by Chris deBurgh) and country fill out the rest of what I heard. Dolly Parton especially. My wife went to the field with her interviewers (all Malawian) one day, armed with her iPod, ready to play DJ, and all that they wanted to play was Eminem and Dolly (an unlikely mix, no?!). She reports that most of her interviewers knew all the words even to her more obscure hits. I met a child called Jolene. And when I went to the field with one of my wife’s groups, in response to my wife’s request to take care of me, one of her Malawian supervisors joked that she would take me just like Jolene. One of her drivers asked if I could burn him some CDs, and after looking through everything I had, all he wanted was any of the rap, and Dolly. Her data team all wanted Dolly CDs too (though I was proud when one of them asked for some REM, after he heard me play “Losing My Religion”).

For my own part, when I went to the field with another of my wife’s interviewers, I found myself amused to hear that Bryan Adams’s “Please Fogive Me” was being mouthed or sung along by all around me. What’s more, when favorite songs play, they usually replay, so I heard “Please Forgive Me” a lot that day. Later, a taxi driver told me how great that song was, correctly identifying Adams as Canadian. And when taking a minibus from Liwonde to Lilongwe, the driver and his friends played Shania Twain’s “Still the One” over and over and over, emoting the words right along with my other Canadian compatriot. I now know much more of the repertoire of Trisha Yearwood than I did before going too.

Interestingly, one man explained to me that country enjoys a good reputation because the big wave of missionaries in the 70s and 80s brought the music with them, and it became associated with their offices and nice big houses, and hence with an escape from manual labor. If he’s right, we have the irony, then, that whereas the music is seen as decidedly lower class and rural in the US (urban snobbery’s calling card is the protestation that “I like any type of music except country”), in Malawi, it’s upper class and urban.

Further illustrating the difference in media contexts is the obsession with cheesy love songs. I suspect an American guy who sung and emoted along with Shania or Bryan Adams might be seen as somewhat effeminate, especially if no wife or girlfriend was there to pawn the fandom off on. But Malawian gender performances work differently, and loving love songs is unproblematic for men, just as being wrapped up in a good soap in front of one’s buddies and random others in a bar was also unproblematic (while hyper-masculinized rap songs or action films also enjoyed great play).

Anyways, this and my last two posts were just a few observations. I want to talk a bit about theories of global media flows in the wake of these in my next post on Malawi.

Malawi only has one television station of its own, TVM, which plays a heck of a lot of political coverage – ranging from the sometimes boring, sometimes very exciting parliamentary coverage (I heard on the radio a segment where they were debating whether the president had raped the country, whether a country could be raped, how one could rape a constitution, etc.) to simply placing the camera at an official dinner, without the mic anywhere relevant. It also plays Malawian music videos and other local stuff such as soccer games, news, or ceremonies, or religious programming (more below). So for anything else, one needs satellite, which is relatively cheap compared to the States, but still often prohibitively expensive for Malawians.

All the same, I was told that successful people may get satellite and share costs with others, or allow neighbors to watch, collecting a small fee when particularly important or popular events are on, such as an English Premiership match (in case you’re counting, Arsenal boasted the most fans, given their relatively large number of African players). Different satellite packages exist, and clearly a lot is available, since my first (Indian-owned) hotel had a few Indian channels, while the Korean-owned hotel that I stayed at in the capital, Lilongwe, had several Korean stations. More commonly on, though, are South Africa’s sports stations (especially with Euro 2008 on while I was there, these were constantly on during game time), BBC World News, a few South African music video stations, Botswana TV, movie channels, Sky News and/or CNN, and God TV.

More after the fold…

Yes, lots of God on television. On all days of the week at all times, I often saw African or American preachers at work on television. Though on one level, religion isn’t in-your-face in Malawi (if I said “bless you” when someone sneezed, since this phrase isn’t used, people gave me an odd look or complimented me on my level of faith), its presence in the public sphere is notable (many stores have names such as Jesus is My Boss Mini Shop, or Praise to Heaven Tire Store). I was particularly intrigued to see God TV on in many a restaurant. That said, it speaks to the degree to which a lot of television was speech- and monologue-based (news and parliamentary access taking up, as said, a lot of time too).

Almost totally absent were American prime time dramas or comedies. There was a South African channel that played an odd assortment of dramas (BSG, Chuck, Brothers and Sisters), but I never saw anyone turn to the channel, nor did I hear people discussing these shows. All the same, the DVD and VCD pirates in the Lilongwe minibus depot were proudly selling Prison Break and CSI, so obviously some such shows have presence, albeit reduced.

Interestingly, then, almost all channels involve screening real life events (parliament, sports matches, sermons, news), or borrowed content (movies, music). It makes for a very different public discussion of TV: gone is talk of Meredith and McDreamy, Jack and Kate, and instead, for instance, I often heard people jokingly debating with each other by saying “Mr. Speaker, sir” (learnt from parliamentary television or radio), or discussing the news. Obama, in particular, is big: Sky News’s channel ident. included a quick clip of Obama saying “Yes We Can” and every time it played, it often swung heads, his voice recognizable to many. Many people wanted to talk Obama with me, and many of them knew a lot about him (more, I’d bet, than the average American voter), meaning that I often got my news updates from others, as when a guy in a bar told me he was happy to see that Hillary was working with Obama now, leading to him and others discussing their joint press conference of the previous day.

Far and beyond parliamentary or news programming, though, was soccer programming. My familiarity with football (the real football, not the handball that Americans doggedly insist on calling football) was probably single-handedly responsible for opening up half of the people with whom I talked. Watching Euro 2008 in the bar at Rumphi proved a wonderful experience, as did catching the spectacular last second goal (quite literally: all stoppage time had been played) by Malawi against Egypt, thereby assuring a victory against the African champions, and increasing Malawi’s chances significantly of qualifying for the African Nations Cup, and possibly even for the World Cup in nearby South Africa in 2010. Soccer shirts were all over the place, from Eto’o Barcelona shirts on poor kids in villages to the Rumphi bartender I befriended who cycled his wardrobe through Malawi, Arsenal, Inter Milan, Real Madrid, and France shirts.

Also, since some of the only drama is provided by Nigerian soaps, as noted in my previous post, a stark difference in the gendering of melodrama is noticeable. I would often sit through lunch in a room full of men, none of whom were talking because they were all transfixed by the scheming and plotting in this afternoon’s Nigerian soap on a channel called Africa Magic. Arsenal and France got the cheers in football, but Nigerian lovetalk got the rapt attention and studious silence. And while Escom, the power supplier, did a better job up in Rumphi, in Liwonde we had blackouts two to four times a day, so serial drama just wouldn’t really work, nor would whodunit procedurals, since you’d have to bank on missing important parts.

Finally, it should be noted that Internet video was pretty much nowhere to be seen. I couldn’t download Word files or access the New York Times’s website in fancy hotels with wi-fi, elsewhere the Internet was used almost solely for email, and thus YouTube and Hulu were hardly in the cards.

That’s it for now. Next up … music

Just to situate things a bit, though, this is drawn on observations from myself and from my research assistant. I was in one town (Liwonde) in the South for two weeks, with small visits to Balaka, Mangochi, and Monkey Bay, then in another town (Rumphi) in the North for another two weeks. I hired my research assistant, Stanslous Ngwire, in Rumphi, and hired him for a month of visiting video shows (more on these below), places where television is played, and CD/DVD stores/stalls, and to conduct, translate, and transcribe interviews in English, Chichewa, or Chitumbuka (the first two being Malawi’s national languages, the third the main language in the North). Stanslous has experience interviewing and is a marvel. But I also chatted a heck of a lot with many people: Malawians are some of the warmest people I’ve met on the planet, and anytime I walked anywhere, I would often end up with someone accompanying me on an ad hoc basis, simply to chat. That said, I’ve yet to really dig into the interviews yet, so these are rudimentary observations. And they’re not based on years in Malawi, so take everything with a grain of salt, yeah?

FILM

Movies in Malawi are seen either via satellite, or in “video shows.” Both usually involve small televisions (ie: if you’d consider it for the foot of the bath, that’s the one). The video shows are usually in a one-room mud-brick building with a few plastic crates or planks of wood for the adults to sit on, and a piece of cardboard for the kids. A few that I went into shared the space with a rat or two, and with the occasional hornet or wasp nest. They usually house around 20 to 30 viewers at any given time. Admission is either 5 or 10 kwacha (3.5 or 7 cents). Usually, “show times” are outside, with a makeshift piece of cardboard telling you the times and the DVD or VCD covers telling you what’s on. You pay to walk in, not for the show, and I found it rare for people to arrive dutifully on time, instead walking in or out as time commitments or interest dictated. Malawi only has five films of its own (I’ve yet to confirm this, but about 6 people gave me this number independently), so almost all movies were American or Nigerian, in English (English is widely spoken in Malawi, though not at an advanced level). English subtitles were usually left on, which helps because the sound systems are pretty awful and cranked up to the point of creating audio crackle. People tended to watch observantly, the quiet in the room interrupted only by occasional comments, by kids coming in to sell snacks such as beans or sugar cane, or when the funny-looking azungu (white person) entered the room, becoming cause for intense amusement and curiosity.

What was on? For American movies, almost exclusively action films (though I’m told that Zomba, the university town, has a video show or two that play the detective and spy dramas/thrillers that the students are supposed to enjoy). Also, almost everything was old.  A few titles include Shoot Fighter, Street Fighter, First Blood, Con Air, Terminator 2, Game of Death, The Return of Swamp Thing, Predator, Red Heat, The Last Hunter, and Barbarian. Jean Claude Van Damme, Sylvester Stallone, Steven Seagal, Bruce Lee, and Arnold Schwarzenegger featured prominently, sometimes even painted on the side of the building. All of the films were pirated, and often took the form of coming in a package with several films. Most such packages were grouped by stars, as star culture is clearly central to viewing. Other names included Wesley Snipes, Nicholas Cage, Bruce Willis, and Tom Cruise. Snipes’s addition to this A list reflects the interest in African-American stars and culture, as movies with white stars and African-American settings featured especially prominently, and as the occasional drama snuck into the mix when featuring an African-American star such as Denzel Washington.

And for the only exception to the American-Nigerian monopoly on eyeballs, plenty of kungfu films were there too.

Overall, though, it was an old collection of films: I never saw a film made after 2000 either playing or advertised as on deck for the day. When I spoke to Malawians, some were quite shocked to hear that Van Damme, Seagal, Schwarzenegger, and Stallone aren’t big stars any more.

The Nigerian stuff tended to feature stories about love, betrayal, witchcraft, and dancing. Acting was usually horrendous, as with all production qualities (in my audience research, many told my research assistant that the shows actually hurt their eyes … and I’m glad I’m not the only one). But for this reason, they had great camp value to me. One, for instance, followed the story of a woman trying to get another woman’s man by any means. First she commissions a witch doctor to poison the woman, to no avail, and so she then asks a bad guy called Bubs to knock her off. When characters go to dance (in deus ex machina style, no less: Bubs, for instance, spuriously demands that they go dancing before he kills the woman), there is often traditional African dancing, or at least hybrid dance styles. There are also long drawn out scenes (well, all the scenes are long and drawn out. I hear that David Bordwell loves films with long shot length, so he’d looooove these) of familial discussions about love. Titles are campy too, such as Lover’s Revenge 5, and King of All Virgins.

Whereas the American action films get a lot of laughing and so forth, the audience is often more reflectively involved in these films (my audience research suggesting at the moment that some Malawians regard them as significantly closer to lived experience, and thus, despite their poor quality, they may be a little more “useful”).

The video shows I attended were frequented only by men, though my research assistant insists that some welcome women too. Malawian women do a heck of a lot of work, mind you, so leisure time for Malawian women isn’t all that common. Also, since some video shows double as “bottle stores” (pubs), or are seen in a similar light, women’s attendance can cast doubt on their values. Clearly, then, movie-watching is more easily a male activity. Within that context, though, the range of viewed material is rather bipolar by American gender standards: hyper-masculine, violent, beat- or -shoot-em-ups on one hand, and hyper-feminized soaps on the other. None of my respondents suggested that watching love stories was “only for girls” or anything like that, suggesting the degree to which the gendering of melodrama is quite culturally specific.

Finally, DVD sales more or less echoed what was playing in the video shows, with American action films, Nigerian love stories, and kungfu flicks filling most of the shelf-space. However, South African films made a bit of an incursion into the market (as they did on television), with a few South African comedies being added to the mix. And foreign films from any nation set in and about Africa broke the action-or-love story hegemony, with The Gods Must Be Crazy and Hotel Rwanda both capturing my eye in a few stores and stalls.

Next up … television