This Commentary builds on a recent interview with Roberta Sassatelli, published in the first issue of this journal (Sassatelli et al, 2022). The interview was wide-ranging, including a discussion of the hegemony of consumer culture in modern life and the politics of consumption – but we focus here on the discussion of decolonising consumption which was highlighted in the title of the interview. We have used this interview and a range of related material in a third-year undergraduate module that we teach on ‘Consumption and Sustainability’ at the University of Sheffield.

In the academy, decolonisation is continuous with the growing salience of wider concerns for equality, diversity and inclusion. However, decolonisation is a distinct field that challenges the orthodoxies of teaching and research in universities. As a field of debate, it carries with it a political weight and criticality through developing from a specific political history involving the processes by which former colonies became politically independent, and including the cultural, economic, social and intellectual legacies of colonisation that persist into the present. Focusing specifically on decolonisation as a political process also encourages students to think about some key anticolonial figures such as Nkrumah, Cabral, Fanon and Ho Chi Minh whose political struggles form an important historical context for contemporary debates about consumption and society.

In this Commentary, we explore the topic in terms of how we might seek to decolonise the academic study of consumption rather than more substantive questions about decolonising consumption practices.¹ In focusing on pedagogical questions about the teaching and learning of consumption, we are conscious of the many questions that could also be asked about decolonising consumption research. These questions would include our citation practices (such as referencing more work from scholars in the Global South), the design of our research (with an emphasis on the necessary but vexed process of co-production), our methodological strategies (including the choice of case studies and our relationship with our research participants), a reflexive awareness of where and how the ‘impact’ of our research is judged, and more. Here, however, we focus on the decolonisation of consumption in our teaching and learning practices.

In the interview, Sassatelli was asked about the relationship between colonialism and the rise of the modern consumer. She replied by focusing on a range of ‘colonial commodities’ such as sugar, tea and coffee, which, she argued, were among the first mass marketed commodities. She traced their evolution from luxury products to part of a wider ‘world of goods’ that created a new moral economy of value, reflecting a struggle between the Global North and South as part of a wider relationship between coloniser and colonised. As these goods became more widely available, Sassatelli suggests, changes also occurred in consumer subjectivity, giving rise to new sensibilities around pleasure, taste and identity. These colonial commodities were also politically charged, with sugar becoming the object of one of the first consumer boycotts (Van Dyk, 2021).

Sassatelli suggests that the process of decolonisation involves a recognition of this colonial history and its continuing legacy. This includes an understanding of the process of becoming ‘increasingly conscious of the historical, geographical and cultural genealogy of consumer culture’ and an expansion of our academic studies to encompass ‘countries which are not the core’. We would like to respond to this agenda, going beyond a simple geographical expansion in the examples we research to explore what else might be involved in decolonising the academic study of consumption.

In our undergraduate teaching on decolonising consumption, we begin by asking students to read our departmental guidelines on ‘decolonising the curriculum’.² These include ideas and recommendations that apply at the programme (degree) level and at the module (course) level, covering learning and teaching, assessment and delivery methods such as classroom teaching, seminars and fieldwork. The guidelines also include a useful glossary of some of the terms that students often find challenging. To give a wider disciplinary context, we share Mona Domosh’s provocative blogpost which asks ‘Why is our curriculum so White?’,³ recognising that who gets to make a claim about the production of formally validated knowledge is an outcome of structurally embedded patterns of privilege and inequality that are themselves continuous with the history of colonialism.

Like many other social and environmental sciences, our particular discipline, Geography, has a long and troubled history of involvement in the politics of Empire, a history whose continued legacy is increasingly being challenged through an explicitly decolonial lens (see, for example, Radcliffe, 2022). We set out some of the reasons why there is an urgent need to decolonise our discipline including data on the under-representation of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) staff and students in UK universities (Desai, 2017). We also present some evidence of an internal audit of our departmental reading lists that shows that around 69 per cent of assigned readings were authored by White men and another 20 per cent by White women, leaving just 11 per cent of readings authored by BAME scholars.⁴

Besides these simple statistics of unequal representation, we also explore the way that biases in the literature and in the range of examples we discuss may serve to normalise a privileged (Eurocentric) viewpoint whereby voices from the Global North are represented as the only source of legitimate academic knowledge about the entire world. We also use a recent paper by Leon Moosavi (2020) to question whether decolonisation has become a ‘bandwagon’ where paying lip-service to these ideas may serve to re-inscribe the very inequalities it seeks to challenge.⁵

Our students then set about considering a number of practical ways in which we might seek to decolonise the study of consumption. Their suggestions have included a more concerted attempt to acknowledge the colonial history of commodification (as outlined by Sassatelli and others); addressing global inequalities in consumption; and recognising the differential responsibility for current sustainability issues. Core to the module, and recognised as particularly relevant here, is a recognition of how our consumption in the UK (and similarly affluent countries) involves co-dependencies with the Global South, through both the commodities we consume and the consequences that follow for distant others. Similarly, our recurrent focus in lectures on the cultural dynamics and geographical specificity of particular contemporary Western expectations and norms of consumption finds additional critical weight through a decolonising approach.

A bolder suggestion from our students was to bring different voices into the classroom, not just through reading or videos. Familiar now with virtual and hybrid forms of engagement, the possibilities for bringing researchers and activists from academically marginalised countries directly into the classroom, as partners in dialogue, are readily apparent to the students we work with. It was also reassuring that students could see the continuities, as well as the challenges, of calls to ‘provincialise’ and situate Western academic orthodoxies with their training in criticality – the imperative to recognise the specificity of where any knowledge claims come from.⁶ Decolonisation of course brings additional critical demands.

We worry, however, that simply adding new examples to our existing curriculum may fall foul of the kind of tokenism that Moosavi and others have highlighted. In a session on the politics of domestic waste, for example, we recently added some examples from the Global South such as Samson’s (2015) paper on the informal economy of a garbage dump in Soweto together with Wheeler and Glucksmann’s (2015) work on waste and recycling, ‘living off tips’ in Brazil and India. These examples raise fundamental questions about how studies of ‘waste’ in the Global South might transform our understanding of its generation and management in the Global North. Or how waste moves from North to South as part of the ‘spatial fix’ that generates such unequal encounters with the ‘waste of the world’ – see Crang et al (2013) and Gregson and Crang (2015) for some indications of how this work might be pursued.

Beyond these specific examples, we have sought to use our teaching to highlight global inequalities in consumption and the implications of these inequalities in terms of a shift to more sustainable patterns of consumption. In teaching on consumption and sustainability, for example, the profound injustices of how consumption and its consequences are distributed are unavoidable. It is of course the world’s wealthy whose levels of consumption most clearly contribute to the ecological crises which humanity face. In relation to the climate crisis, for instance, it is calculated that the richest 10 per cent of the world’s population is responsible for almost 50 per cent of consumption-based emissions, while the poorest 50 per cent are responsible for just over 10 per cent of emissions (Gore, 2020; Chancel, 2022).

Addressing the continued coloniality in unequal relations of production, consumption and pollution globally, while seeking to reduce humanity’s total resource demands to within the planet’s productive capacity, must involve changes to the consumption practices of the world’s relatively wealthy. We thus defend our module’s emphasis on understanding the consumption dynamics of the world’s relatively wealthy as consistent with a decolonisation agenda. This, of course, does not preclude recognition of the very evident agency of people in poorer countries, as demonstrated by activists in the Global South collectively playing a leading role in shaping the global climate justice movement (Schlosberg and Collins, 2014).

Hall goes on to explore ‘the outside history that is inside the history of the English’, showing that there is ‘no English history without that other history’ (Hall, 1991: 49).

Referring to the work of Mintz and Hall leads on to a discussion of how slavery (and the exploitation, oppression and inequalities to which it gave rise) helped produce an imperial core and a colonial periphery, including its implications for the global politics of consumption which continue to this day. Thinking about slavery and empire also prompts a wider debate about the structural forces of capitalism which propelled a political economy of territorial dispossession, the plundering of resources and the exploitation of labour, which have continuing relevance in terms of how we might think about more equitable and sustainable forms of production and consumption.

In our teaching, we propose a range of other sources that fulfil Sassatelli’s call to examine countries that are ‘not the core’ in conventional understandings of contemporary consumption, combining this with our intention to read well-established studies ‘against the grain’. For example, we include Ian Cook’s work on papaya which adopts a ‘follow the thing’ approach to explore the complex entanglements between Caribbean agricultural production and diverse points of consumption in the Global North (Cook, 2004). Cook’s work presents a montage of images and accounts rather than a linear commodity chain approach. Yet it also lends itself to a decolonial reading where relations of exploitation and histories of inequality are never far below the surface. Similarly, we teach Daniel Miller’s work on the consumption of Coca-Cola in Trinidad (Miller, 2002), which, he insists, cannot be understood as a simple example of the ‘Americanisation’ of Caribbean food and drink. Rather, Miller explores more localised understandings of the appropriation of this particular ‘black sweet drink’ involving local bottling plants, franchising arrangements and specific ways of consuming rum and Coke. There are, we suggest, many other examples that could be treated in this way.

Finally, we suggest that it may be possible to use some of our existing conceptual resources to address a more explicitly decolonial agenda. Examples might include Said’s work on Orientalism (Said, 1978), studies of the transnational consumption of food and fashion (Crang et al, 2003), notions of authenticity and constructions of the exotic (Hutnyk, 2000; Heldke, 2015). Suggestions of what this might look like when developed in detail can be seen in McClintock’s (2013) pioneering work on the marketing of soap and other products of the colonial encounter, tracing the complex intersections of race, gender and sexuality in the imperial and post-colonial imagination.

Where, as in several of the examples above, we engage the work of White British academics on phenomena from the Global South, there are additional lines of critical reflection with which to engage students. Indeed, through all of these efforts, we are conscious of our own situatedness. As two White male professors in a Russell Group UK university, it is arguably impossible for us to fully escape valid critiques like those of Moosavi (2020). In bringing subaltern voices and postcolonial philosophies into our seminar rooms in Sheffield, are we righting some wrongs of the intellectual traditions in which we stand? Or are we ourselves reproducing coloniality, now appropriating experience and ideas from the Global South to re-legitimise our privilege in the face of new challenges to it? Given our situation as higher education teachers, we can only seek to judge what is likely to be the less problematic option, acknowledging our privileged situation and opening it up to critique.

These are just some our initial attempts to provide the conceptual and practical tools to help our students and ourselves to ‘decolonise consumption’, and some of the challenges that it entails. There is much more work to be done, involving a wider constellation of voices and diverse perspectives. We hope this Commentary will help extend the discussion that Sassatelli’s recent interview in this journal began.