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Critique by stealth: aspiration, consumption and class in post-apartheid television drama

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02560040903509218

1992-6049

Loren Kruger,

South Asian Cinema and Culture

Abstract The national broadcaster in post-apartheid South Africa still uses the rhetoric of nation-building and commemorating the anti-apartheid struggle, but its practice follows neoliberal norms of maximising revenue from advertising on fictional series that celebrate the conspicuous consumption of the new elite. The endorsement of individual consumption as the sign of national prosperity sets in sharp relief the rhetoric of success that encourages the havenot majority to identify with fictions of aspiration towards affluence and the wealth gap that makes this aspiration impossible. Although most television fiction uncritically reproduces this aspirational narrative, recent series such as Gaz'lam and The LAB have dramatised the contradiction between fictions of consumption and the reality of exclusion. Rather than rehearsing the anti-apartheid formula of heroic struggle against capitalism, however, they perform ‘critique by stealth’, with the cunning that Brecht advised for ‘telling the truth in dark ti...