Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization

1. Similitude and Global Relationships: Self-Representation in Mutsamudu

Chapter 1 Similitude and Global Relationships Self-Representation in Mutsamudu 13 A town on a small island in the Indian Ocean once acquired a voracious appetite for English things. It was not a British colony, and it hosted neither an English Consulate nor a permanent English resident until the 1850s—fully two centuries after islanders began their relationship with the English. By consuming English goods, speaking English, and asserting an affiliation with Britain, the people of Mutsamudu town on Nzwani (Anjouan) Island in the Mozambique Channel created an intimacy with a global power and parlayed their claims to a special, at times familial, relationship with Britain into economic and political support. Through various strategies of representation, Mutsamuduans claimed a moral proximity and similarity to the English that convinced Britons to view them differently, to imagine them as people in some way akin to themselves. For at least a century Mutsamuduans were largely successful at using things that signified Englishness to direct imperial means to local ends. This chapter seeks to reveal the efficacy of cross-cultural performances of similarity—a strategy of appeal that I call similitude—on the stage of global relation. It demonstrates how the strategic uses of imported symbols affected the producers of those symbols and ultimately their relation to Nzwanians. Nzwanians relied on similitude to affect relations with diverse foreigners, including Arab, French, and American visitors. But by exploring the extreme case of Nzwanian appropriations of Englishness, we can more clearly discern how the cultural appropria- tion of symbols in even seemingly marginal locales has affected patterns of global interrelation. Strategy and Globality One of the most important questions that analysts of global integration have addressed is how people who are too easily labeled the victims of global cultural homogenization conceptually transform imported materials , symbols, and ideas.1 Aviad Raz describes this analytical impulse as an attempt to augment scholarly focus on cultural imperialism with a consideration of the “reception” of global symbols.2 The entrance of such terms as domestication, hybridization, localization, and even the orthographically unwieldy glocalization into vocabularies of analysis reveal the increasing attention given to reinterpretation in the global circulation of signs.3 Expanding on Michel de Certeau’s insight that the masses always renegotiate the meanings offered them, many analysts of reception have convincingly shown that meanings are rarely as transferable as their objects. The work of Aviad Raz, Mark Alfino and his colleagues , and Joseph Tobin, among others, suggests that even when such symbolically laden products as McDonald’s hamburgers or Hollywood movies circulate globally, their uses and social relevance can diverge dramatically among national, cultural, and gendered spaces.4 As James Watson has illustrated for McDonald’s in East Asia, things as simple as processed fast foods can easily lose both their associations with their place of origin as well as the cultural meanings given them in their home society.5 The strength of reception literature thus lies in its demonstration that symbols circulating beyond the boundaries of their places of origin are rarely simple copies. Instead, imported things are often socially and culturally reconstituted, and given compound local meanings and associations that are sometimes directly related to foreign meanings and sometimes quite distinct from them. In its stress on the internal dynamics of cultural domestication, reception literature has yet to adequately address the possibility that cultural incorporations can be directed back at the source of their perceived fabrication and can even affect that perceived source, a phenomenon Michael Taussig referred to as the ability of the copy to influence that which it copies.6 While rationales for domestication are born of diverse, specific social circumstances, the effects of domestication need never be solely local. In championing the integrity of local interpretations, it is too easy to neglect the fact that incorporation is at times expressly desired to 14 Similitude and Global Relationships develop a new kind of relation with the sources of such symbols. This chapter expands on reception literature by addressing the ways in which domestications of goods, etiquette, and ideas can work toward multiple, translocal, and reciprocal ends. Further, the Nzwani example points up an increasingly important topic in the analysis of global integration: the function of cultural domestication in fashioning global relations. In Nzwani we are confronted with a marginal, noncolonial polity that incorporated English symbols and, in turn, affected its relationship to an emerging superpower through a mastery of those symbols. By...