Consumption: advancing postcolonial perspectives from the Global South

Sarayed-Din, L; Hughes, A

Consumption: advancing postcolonial perspectives from the Global South

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Alexandra Hughes ORCiD

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This is the authors' accepted manuscript of a book chapter that has been published in its final definitive form by Bristol University Press, 2024.

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Abstract

Studies of consumption have long been positioned at the intersection of economic and cultural geography embracing the interplay between industry and commerce and the life-worlds through which goods and services are purchased, used, and experienced. Economic geographers have played an important role in mapping and conceptualizing the commodity chains linking consumers with local, regional, and global systems of production, as well as understanding landscapes of retail and household economies. This chapter acknowledges a rich suite of consumption studies to which economic geography has contributed, but it also seeks to unsettle dominant narratives of consumption driven by western framings. We suggest that perspectives of postcolonial economy help to foreground more inclusive and diverse geographies of consumption and theorization from global South settings. To demonstrate this, we take food as our empirical focus and specifically examine changing discourses of food consumption in Brazil. We use a postcolonial lens to broaden the analysis of domestic food consumption in Brazil, revealing its plural contingencies and histories. In doing so, we place the values and models of food consumption in Brazil on the centre stage, with all its potential to inform critical and plural perspectives on contemporary economic geography.