Who Laughs at a Rape Joke? Illiberal Responsiveness in Rodrigo Duterte\u27s Philippines

When a presidential contender makes a joke about lusting over a dead Australian missionary, calls the Pope the son of a whore, and confesses to killing criminals during his tenure as city mayor, one could expect that this candidate would not go very far. But not in the year 2016. Dubbed as ‘the year of voting dangerously,’ the Philippines rode the tide of global discontent and gave landslide victory to the controversial Rodrigo Duterte. This chapter examines the discursive underpinnings of Duterte’s rise to power by focusing on the process in which his supporters made ethical calculations from listening to his official speeches, live performance on television debates, and broader discussions in news and social media during the campaign period. We argue that Duterte’s ‘crass politics’ is a push back to the dominant moral politics perpetuated by institutions associated to the Philippines\u27 liberal democratic elite. While we condemn the Duterte regime’s disregard for human rights and due process, especially in the context of his bloody war on drugs, we also advocate a closer look at the ethics of Duterte’s responsiveness to deep-seated injuries endured by his constituencies both among marginalised and middle-class communities. Through a careful yet critical unpacking of his ‘crass politics of responsiveness’ from ethnographic research with Duterte supporters and media analysis of Duterte’s public performances, we hope to put forward a precise understanding of the emerging moral politics that underpins this unorthodox regime

Dancing the Butterfly: Trans-Caribbean Cultural Consumption in Special Period Cuba

This paper takes as its starting point memories of an encounter which saw a Jamaican dancehall queen perform on a locally produced television show in Santiago de Cuba at the height of the Special Period economic crisis. I propose that this encounter was a harbinger of subsequent experiences of popular culture consumption in contemporary Cuba, while also drawing from histories of regional connection that placed Santiago de Cuba in a constellation of trans-Caribbean exchanges. The moment shows how, during the Special Period crisis, media producers sought new paths through which to navigate the technological challenges of making television amidst material shortages, and in doing so created new imaginaries of a transnational consumer culture which featured (specific and appropriate) newly built spaces of leisure and distinctive brands of consumption. The television broadcast was a consciously crafted mediation of emerging consumer cultures that at once repudiated and represented the everyday experience of Cuban society as rooted in crisis, scarcity, and socialist taste hierarchies

From White Nation to White Caution: Non-Indigenous Reflections on Indigenous Difference

Based on interviews with 31 non-Indigenous Australians during 2015–2017, this article argues that there is no “typical” non-Indigenous Australian way of talking and thinking about Indigenous Australia. Rather, a more plausible reading of our data is that non-Indigenous Australians are experiencing, in a self-aware and cautious way, the ascendancy of the idea that the Indigenous/non-Indigenous distinction is culturally, morally and politically significant. While interviewees varied in their views about Indigenous difference, their awareness that Indigeneity poses relatively new and compelling questions for Australians was evident in their reflexive ways of talking, as they took up a position in (what they evoked or implied as) a field of non-Indigenous opinion. We propose a model of the orthodoxy that defines this field. Reviewing previous research on non-Indigenous Australians’ everyday attitudes and opinions about Indigenous Australians, we seek to replace accounts that postulate non-Indigenous thinking as a singular edifice. We present popular discourse as the self-aware taking of positions, in known or imagined fields of opinion

Understanding consumer culture in Latin America: an introduction

This collection brings together recent work from across the humanities and social sciences on consumption, consumers, and consumer culture in Latin America. It presents original research by sociologists, anthropologists, media and cultural studies scholars, geographers, and historians; contributors range from the most senior scholars working on these topics today, to emerging early career researchers, and includes academics based in Latin American institutions as well as others working in North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Although the strength of the volume derives from this diversity of contributors and that of the approaches and topics they cover, it can make understanding the relationship between the various papers, and even understanding what “consumer culture” might be, whether in Latin America or in any other region of the world, a challenge. Chapters in this book consider consumption practices and consumer culture in places as diverse as Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, the Andean region, Brazil, and Chile, covering topics such as media, cultural production and creative industries, household consumption, tourism, shopping, and environmental and economic consequences of globalization among other things. The goal of this introductory chapter, then, is to explain how such varied studies of consumption might be relevant to scholars and students of Latin America, as well as to demonstrate and explain the particular importance occupied by Latin American societies, and the Latin American region as a whole, in the growing world scholarship on consumption and consumers

The challenge of flow: state socialist television between revolutionary time and everyday time

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Media, Culture & Society and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0163443715594869This article contributes to the growing literature on diverse television cultures globally and historically by examining selected aspects of television cultures in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Being part of a political, economic and cultural system that self-consciously set out to develop an alternative form of modern society, state socialist television offers a particularly apposite case study of alternative forms of modern television. State socialist television was inevitably drawn into the Cold War contest between two rival visions of modernity and modern life: one premised on liberal democracy and the market economy, the other on communist rule and the planned economy. As a result, its formats, content and uses were different from those familiar from western television histories. The analysis, based on 70 life-story interviews, schedule analysis and archival sources, focuses on the temporal structures of television and on the challenges posed by television’s ability to offer an instantaneous connection to the unfolding present. We argue that the nature of television temporality had ambiguous consequences for the communist project, allowing citizens of state socialist countries to disconnect from communist ideals while at the same time synchronizing their daily life with the ongoing march towards the radiant communist future