IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/deveza/v32y2015i1p118-129.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

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

Author

Listed:
  • Sophie Chevalier

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 previously 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'.

Suggested Citation

  • Sophie Chevalier, 2015. "Food, malls and the politics of consumption: South Africa's new middle class," Development Southern Africa, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 32(1), pages 118-129, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:deveza:v:32:y:2015:i:1:p:118-129
    DOI: 10.1080/0376835X.2014.965388
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/0376835X.2014.965388
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/0376835X.2014.965388?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:deveza:v:32:y:2015:i:1:p:118-129. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/CDSA20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.