This seminar asks how cultural products engage with, challenge, and/or succumb to neoliberal market forces, commodification, and exoticisation in the context of  transnational cultural and creative industries. The term “boutique postcolonialism” suggests that products from perceived cultural margins are re-packaged and marketed to satisfy metropolitan or cosmopolitan appetites for the ‘exotic’ while perpetuating structures of inequality and cultural consumption. These processes involve the creative industries and their stakeholders; lawmakers and regulators; educators, critics, and mediators; writers and producers; as well as readers and consumers. Through case studies in literature, theatre, cinema, and, to some extent, art, tourism, and fashion, this seminar explores how cultural difference can be aestheticized, sanitized, and commodified, which strategies of compliance, resistance, or subversion can be found, and how postcolonial studies and decolonial practice continue to engage with this.

The seminar invites reflection on the complexities of and tensions between cultural agency, “authenticity”, and commodification. Students will engage with key theoretical debates in postcolonial studies, critical race theory, and cultural economy, interrogating the politics and ethics of representation at the intersections of cultural production and global circuits of capital. Considering forms of cultural exchange beyond a consumption-driven logic, class presentations, group work, workshops, and term papers, will allow students to research, develop, and evaluate strategies for decolonial critique and ethical cultural engagement.

Kurs im HIS-LSF