INTEREST CATEGORY: GLOBAL MARKETING
POSTING TYPE: Calls: Other

Author: Özlem Sandıkcı

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Call for Chapters

POSTCOLONIAL MARKETING COMMUNICATION: IMAGES FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH (Springer Nature) Editors: Arindam Das, Himadri Roy Chaudhuri & Ozlem Sandikci Turkdogan

The Editors invite extended chapter proposals of approximately 350 words for an edited book focusing on postcolonial marketing communication. This volume aims to generate an exchange of ideas and insights between academics and professionals on the role of postcolonialty within the ambits of marketing, consumer literature, and communication. We welcome chapter proposals on any aspect of this theme.

The system of hegemonic domination and overpowering influence over the ‘less developed’ countries/cultures exercised through a set of ideological measures and economic instruments by the more powerful countries (relatively from the Global North) continues till this very day. Sartre (1964) noted this trend as the European imperial powers continued to ideologically dominate most of their former colonies. Subsequent theorizations by Said, Fanon, Bhabha, Spivak et al. have thrown significant light on the phenomenon. However, it is not only the reactionary responses to the European imperialism or colonialism that comprise of the discursive postcolonial terrain, but even the responses to the recent neocolonial-capitalist-global power prerogatives that expand the scope of postcolonialism (Loomba, 2015).

The postcolonial condition (along with its trajectories of hybridity, ambivalence, mimicry, diaspora, deterritorialization, third space, orientalism, subalternity, or even the anticolonial resistances, and decolonial transformations) remains a dominant reality even today in the context of the larger global politico-economic paradigm. The attempts of transcending the aftermaths of colonialism and neocolonialism and its coercive or ideologically regulating processes by the colonized/subaltern/marginalized subjects are not to be missed. The normalization of socio-cultural-epistemic violence has always been met with the postcolonial “transformative reflexes” (McLeod, 2007, 5) that resist, challenge, negotiate or narrate the imperial/neocolonial hegemony. Even attempts towards decolonization, in the form of a “movement for moral justice and political solidarity against imperialism” (Duara, 2004, 2) or the anti-colonial counterculture of resistance (Gopal, 2019), are but postcolonial reactionary politics of insurgencies to imperialism. The more recent attempts at “preventing the financial powers of the developed countries being used in a way to impoverish the less developed ones” (Nkrumah, 1965, 30) is an anti-imperial agenda that owes to the intransigent discourses and unanswerability of the resistive subjects of the postcolonial condition.

Such post/anti/decolonial reactions are no less to be traced in the way the marketing tacts of the global south (the concept of the market in itself being a mimetic adoption of the colonial/imperial/global world order) communicates to its consumers. The site of marketing communication in the Global South witnesses the Western tropes of marketing communication being re-produced and re-presented through a mimetic subversion that is achieved through the deployment of eclectic tools in the media. Thus, it is a truism to find how the Global South has adopted a marketing communication system, in its theorization and practice, that reflects Western motifs, icons, and narratives (Varman and Saha 2009), but this time mediated through the modernity of their own (Chatterjee, 1997). The cultural practices of the marketing communication of the Global South have been successfully able to devalorize the ‘innocent’ episteme of the West. The responsible-responsive politics of the marketing communication of the Global South problematizes the configurations of western images of the colonized subjects. The de-universalization of the Western episteme as propounded in the marketing communication of the (neo)colonizer is made possible through a nativist turn. Moving beyond the benign ahistoricity of the Western marketing communications, the marketing communication discourses from the vantage of postcolonial realities highlight the experiences of inequities and deep divide. However, it would be wrong to seek a coeval pan-image of reaction in the marketing creativities from the Global South to the varied forces of imperialism. When historically situated, the resentment of the margin in the cultural space of marketing communication ventilates the “local-native-indigenous reality” that “has been touched by the morphology of modernism and the dominance of nationalism and the nation-state” (Radhakrishnan, 2000, 37). Hence, beyond the slogans of all-pervasive, sweeping globalization, the marcom from the margin unleashes discursivity by narrating the hegemonic ideologues of culture, economy, politics, and privilege.

This collection intends to be one of its kind in creating the space for voices of critical marcom about the Global South. We invite incisive articles that help to catapult the discourse of marcom beyond the one-world global, stable, conventional narrative and consciously complicate cultural interconnectivities using the lens of postcolonial scholarship. Although, the lens of postcolonialism and marketing discourses have been effectively used (viz. Kjeldgaard and Askegaard, 2006; Varman and Saha, 2009; Üstüner and Holt, 2010; Sandikci and Ger, 2011; Varman and Belk, 2012; Cova et al., 2013; Varman and Sreekumar, 2015; Tadajewski, et al., 2018; Koegler, 2018), and there has been some dispersed meditation in the field of marketing images and postcolonialism (Varman, Cyla, and Sreekumar, 2011; Wulan, 2017; Ghandeharion and Morteza, 2017; Ghandeharion, 2018; Ghandeharion, 2019), yet our critical anthology intends to be the first to open a substantial dialogue in “postcolonial marketing communication”. However, there had been some noteworthy work on tourism images/advertisement of the Global South from the postcolonial lens (Britton, 1979; Weightman, 1987; Echtner and Prasad, 2003; Hall and Tucker, 2004; Hasseler, 2008; Wikes, 2016; Atayi, 2020) that critique the privileged Western gaze, yet this is too focused an area to contribute to the holistic thesis of postcolonial marketing communication.

The Present edited volume seeks empirical and conceptual work on such topics to better understand and analyze the phenomenon of postcolonial marketing communication, how it is experienced, and its impact on Global South will be given preference. For empirical papers, all methods will be considered. The editors welcome submissions from academics and researchers in the field of Cultural Studies, Critical Communication, Marketing, Consumer Research, and Macromarketing. Please consult the suggestive list (indicative not exhaustive) of topics below:

1. Marketing communication and the Imperial History/Genealogy/Archaeology
2. Marketing Communication and the Narratives of Nationalism
3. Marketing Communication and the Subaltern Cultural Politics
4. Marketing Communication and Ethnonationalism
5. Aboriginal/Fourth World Marketing Communication
6. Can the Subaltern Speak through Marketing Communication?
7. Marketing Communication and its Fragments
8. Provincializing Marketing Communication
9. Dalit Marketing Communication
10. Diasporic Marketing Communication
11. Marketing Communication and Postcolonial Displacements
12. Borders, Nation-State and Marketing Communication
13. Marketing Communication and the Black Identity
14. Marketing Communication and Nativism
15. Marketing Communication and Issues of Postcolonial Gender Identity
16. Marketing Communication and Digital Postcolonialism
17. Marketing Communication and Decolonization
18. Marketing Communication and Anti-colonialism
19. Marketing Communication, Disparities, and Capitalism/Globalization
20. Marketing Communication and Whiteness Studies

Email Abstracts to:

Arindam Das: arindam.das@alliance.edu.in
Himadri Roy Chaudhuri: himadri@xlri.ac.in
Ozlem Sandikci Turkdogan: Ozlem.SandikciTurkdogan@glasgow.ac.uk

Key Dates

Last date of submission of Abstracts: 15 June 2021
Decision on Abstract: 30 June 2021
Last date for full Paper submission: 15 November 2021