Consumption Culture and Critical Sustainability Discourses: Voices from the Global South

Abstract

Our qualitative critical research intends to examine the meta-normative features of the sustainability discourse of the marginalized Global South through sociological critique of (neo)colonial and anti-sustainable consumption. Using a critical lens, we discuss two community performances of sustainable consumer culture from the Global South to highlight the subversive consumption performances in the Global South market, which has the potency to ontologically denaturalize the Global North market’s standard-normalized Western discourses of sustainability that tend to legitimize social inequalities and the seizing of agency by marginalized consumers of subsistence marketplace. The article contributes to both sustainability and consumer culture literature by proposing a new research agenda: the way sustainable consumption culture projects and negotiates identity in the Global South, especially at the margin. We highlight how traditional sustainable prosumption of subaltern subjects of the Global South resists power practices promulgated by Western capitalism, neoliberalism, and neocolonization.