- Title
- Middle-class anxiety and moderate prosperity: South Africa and China in comparative perspective
- Creator
- Abraham, Ibrahim
- Date
- 2020
- Type
- Text; Journal article
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/196644
- Identifier
- vital:18743
- Identifier
-
https://doi.org/10.22160/22035184/ARAS-2020-41-2/5-26
- Identifier
- ISSN:1447-8420 2203-5184
- Abstract
- This article presents the first comparative study of the middle class in Africa and China, drawing on published research from both regions, furnished with analysis of popular culture and ethnographic insights from research on South Africa's new black middle class. This study explores four topics of theoretical and empirical significance. Firstly, definitional debates about the qualitative and quantitative classification of the middle class, including the appropriateness of the term in (South) Africa and China. Secondly, the appropriation of the Chinese concept of xiaokang (moderate prosperity) for the study of Africa. Thirdly, anxiety over social and economic status, related in particular to distinctions between strata within the middle class, building on a distinction between middle-class moderate prosperity and middle-class affluence. Fourthly, anxiety over contradictions between emerging individual desires and traditional familial commitments, impacting South Africa's moderately prosperous in particular, with broader cultural implications for emerging African and Chinese modernities.
- Publisher
- African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific (AFSAAP)
- Relation
- The Australasian review of African studies Vol. 41, no. 2 (2020), p. 5-26
- Rights
- All metadata describing materials held in, or linked to, the repository is freely available under a CC0 licence
- Rights
- Copyright AFSAAP
- Subject
- Ethnology; Evaluation; Lifestyles; Middle class; Popular culture and globalization; MD Multidiscplinary
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