Following on from two previous posts of mine about selling Lost in Malawi, I wanted to share the cover copy on a pirated DVD of Deadwood Season 2 that I found there. A couple of comments on marketing, piracy, and globalization follow afterward:

Dawn dawn of the desert, this barbarian and the settlement of the fugitives in the spring of 1877 a lot of changes. Many of the new immigrants arriving and gradually improve the management of refugee camps so that the original vitality of the town. With the At the same time, the atmosphere gradually diffuse crime, money and driven by the desire of the people here, and all of this is that the wonders of Deadwood …

Description story of the history of the United States of gold surges, a snatch and the greed of the story to focus on border towns in the United States and that its illegal border in the relentless forces of competition. This is illegal colonial towns, an violence and not uncivilized outpost, the colorful personality to attract people to order — from being deprived of legal protection and entrepreneurs to former soldiers and Qiaozhazhe, Chinese laborers, male prostitution. these people on the bizarre story, as this evil town.

Quite the joyride through language, no? And yet, if one can get beyond laughing at the grammar and feeling superior, I’d pose that this is no less functional than anything you’d read on the back of an official DVD. It’s the words that matter, but only the words – at the end of this, we know Deadwood is about the United States, illegality, civilization/barbarity, borders, beginnings/newness/dawn, an evil vital town, color and personality, gold, greed, cultural clashes, and so forth. Proper grammar might actually get in the way, from this standpoint, backing away from punching the key words and retreating instead to a boring narrative that wouldn’t necessarily capture the exuberance that the above copy does. It’s beat poetry, not much different from the “marvel,” “wonder,” “violent masterpiece” that we might see quoted all over another poster. Maybe sentences get in the way of selling?

More importantly, though, and changing gears, I want to note that this, as with many/most of the pirated DVDs here, originated in China, which might explain the otherwise somewhat odd privileging of “Qiaozhazhe, Chinese laborers.” And thus we’re actually seeing how Chinese pirates are attempting to sell the show, not how Malawians think other Malawians will be drawn in. This is an important twist, since it shows the role that Chinese pirates are playing as taste-makers and cultural intermediaries. I continually wanted to know how stuff gets into Malawi and what is chosen. Why, for instance, could I buy 24, Prison Break, Primeval (go Brit shows!), Lost, Desperate Housewives, or at one storefront Monk (?!), but not much else? Why Deadwood Season 2, but never Seasons 1 or 3? Usually the answer to this question in global media studies has been because Hollywood forced it into the market. But here it’s because Chinese pirates sold it to Chinese dealers in South African who sold it to one of a very few guys from Blantyre, Malawi, who make frequent trips to Johannesburg, then disseminate the DVDs across the rest of Malawi. Hollywood’s official presence in Malawi is next to nil, and though its unofficial presence is significant, it’s via China and South Africa.

As far as any of the dealers could tell me, the Chinese pirates know nothing about Malawi, and they seem to know only marginally more about South Africa (DVDs with movies about Apartheid abound, albeit with odd titles like “The Roots of Slavery” or “Wild Africa”). The dealers also told me they have little if no role in deciding what gets pirated; indeed, most only knew what their store and their competitors’ sold. So the Chinese pirates aren’t truly responding to demand; rather, they’re offering a standardized product that sells around the world (note the “Qiaozhazhe” clearly intended for a Chinese audience). This produces a significantly more complex model of global media flow (and moreso of cultural imperialism) at play, especially when one realizes that a lot of Malawians see their TV in “video shows” (who buy from the DVD dealers) or privately off DVD players; hence, the pirates’ version is culturally dominant.

My mind’s still spinning about what this means, and I present this as a field note, not as a completed thought; I hope that others might have some thoughts about what all this means and whether it might shift some of our thinking about global media flows and the cultural intermediaries that make them work.

Let’s back up a bit first, though, to discuss why a room full of Malawians cared so very much that Ghana, a country that is almost 2800 miles away, would win against the seemingly innocuous “villains” of Uruguay.

I want to start by backing up to my frustrations of watching several first round games in the US. Not only is ABC and ESPN’s announcing shockingly bad, but I found that it often walked straight into nasty racist tropes of treating “Africa” as a singular entity. The stats bothered me in particular – I was often told by the screen that “no African team had ever won a game it was losing at the first half,” or so forth. The stats seemed as eager as the announcers to consign “Africa” to being a single unit, either a blameworthy one (as if to say, “damn Africa, why can’t you win a game after the first half? What’s wrong with you?”) or a pitiable one. ABC and ESPN’s treatment of “Africa,” therefore, fit too easily into a centuries-old hackneyed and sloppy racism that can’t see differences within Africa, that frequently treats Africa as a single nation, and that either scorns that nation’s dysfunctionality or pities it and hopes for its small victories as a parent might laugh and clap at an infant saying a funny word for the first time.

And yet I’d seen at Euro 2008, staged during my previous visit to Malawi, how much Africanness matters. Many Malawians I spoke to then had supported France, due to the large number of players from African countries; when France spluttered out of the tournament early on, most shifted allegiances quickly to Spain, and many explained that this was because Spain had several Arsenal players, and Arsenal had several Africans. Eto’o jerseys abounded.

Here in 2010, again Africanness mattered. Earlier, I’d watched The Netherlands play Brazil, and the room had a decidedly lighter feel to it than when Ghana took the stage. Tension gripped the room, and “Ghana moto!” (“Ghana fire!” or “go Ghana!”) yells interchanged with “Africa moto!” The South African channel’s announcers, led by Nelson Mandela’s example earlier in the week, had embraced Ghana whole-heartedly as “our” team. And the celebration following the Ghanaian goal was like no goal celebration I’d seen; earlier in the day, The Netherlands was the room’s clear favorite, but cheers at their goals were tepid by comparison.

From all of this, I want to draw two conclusions.

One is to reiterate the perhaps banal point that when a subjugated group is discursively constructed, members of that group are bound to make what was a semantic and semiotic trick (making all of Africa a single unit) something of a reality through identifying with their fellows in subjugation. Malawians could and perhaps should vigorously assert their individuality – and at other times, of course they do – but if on one hand nobody bothers to listen when they do, and on the other hand there are pleasures in the strategic essentialism of “being African,” one can understand why it happens.

Two is to encourage readers not to fall headlong into the generalizations themselves by seeing this as “Africa’s heartbreak.” Sure, it would have been nice if Ghana won. But the ills that have been delivered across Africa by centuries of Euro-American aggression and exploitation were hardly going to be redressed by Ghana winning a football match or three, nor has the continent felt this as a shattering blow to the heart. Today, business is back to usual, and I saw way more day-after depression when Canada crashed out of Olympic hockey in Gretzky’s last year than I see here today. If “Africa” exists, it is only in brief moments anyways, so to pity Africa and feel sorry for “its” loss is to fall into the discursive trap of giving the term “Africa” – complete with its significant colonial baggage – more mileage than it deserves.