Neoliberal Leveraging of the Colonial Imagination: A Global South Reading of Tobacco Ads in Africa.

Africa's portrayal in the hegemonic imagination has been subjected to critical analysis for many decades. Three features stand out in my analysis. First, I focus on how that hegemonic imagination produces and correlates whiteness to progress through cigarette marketing. Second, I am concerned with the specifically neoliberal leveraging of the imaginary repertoire of classic European colonialism. Neoliberal colonialism repurposes old phantasmagoria according to its own modes of dominance and exploitation, engaging in a form of racialisation that is much more subtle but equally effective. Third, I use my own situated reading from elsewhere in the periphery to triangulate and break open the classic dichotomic opposition between Africa and the West. In supplanting the Africa/West dichotomy with a tripartite division of the world as analytical category, new ways in which the hegemonic idea of Africa benefits neoliberal colonialism surface. Working classes globally are driven to read their exploitation as a comparative privilege, while comprador elites are disciplined into cooperation and compliance. These ideas are investigated by means of visual analyses of tobacco ads in Africa. I focus on how youths are lured into global economic and semiotic value circuits to produce the spectacular and spectral normativity of a whitened global bourgeoisie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]