Bringing together critical race, queer and decolonial analytical approaches, visual analysis, and multimodal discourse analysis, this book explores the discursive strategies deployed by African luxury brands in an age of cross-platform, intertextual branding. Building on literature examining the aesthetics and politics of African luxury, this book demonstrates how leading African luxury brands create visual material speaking to complex sensibilities of culture, nature, and future. Iqani shows how powerful brand narratives and strategies reveal ethical and ideological messages that function to re-position Africa in an increasingly congested global marketplace of ideas. In acknowledging that there is a strong political validity to recognizing the importance of African brands staking their claim in luxury, this book also problematizes the role these brands play in the promotion of luxury discourses, advancing the project of capitalism and their contribution to broader patterns of inequality. Shedding new light not only on luxury branding strategies but also on the idea of a luxurious global “Africanicity” and on the complex cultural politics of South Africa, African Luxury Branding will be of interest to advanced students and researchers in disciplines, including Critical Advertising Studies, African Studies, Media and Communications.

Moving far beyond predominant views of Africa as a place to be "saved," and even more recent celebratory formulations of it as "rising," African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics highlights and critically interrogates the visual and material cultures of lavish and luxurious consumption already present on the continent. Methodologically, conceptually, and analytically, the collection dismantles taken-for-granted ideas that the West is the source and focus of high-end and hyper-desirable material cultures. It explores what the culture of consumption means in Africa in both historical and contemporary contexts, studying diverse luxury phenomena including fashion advertising, reality television, retail, gendered consumption, and gardening to re-center the discussion on existing contemporary luxury cultures across the continent. Moving far beyond predominant views of Africa as a place to be 'saved', and even more recent celebratory formulations of it as 'rising', African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics highlights and critically interrogates the visual and material cultures of lavish and luxurious consumption already present on the continent. Methodologically, conceptually and analytically, the collection dismantles taken-for-granted ideas that the West is the source and focus of high-end and hyper-desirable material cultures. It explores what the culture of consumption means in Africa in both historical and contemporary contexts, studying diverse luxury phenomena including fashion advertising, reality television, retail, gendered consumption and gardening to re-centre the discussion on existing contemporary luxury cultures across the continent.

Africa Fashion explores the kaleidoscope of craft cultures that have shaped African fashion for centuries and captures the intriguing stories of pioneering and contemporary African brands. Part One retells the history of African fashion, exploring Africa's textile traditions, artisanship in jewelry and embellishment and the continent's role as a global resource. The second part presents a New Africa and examines the promise and potential of Africa's markets, while challenging stereotypes and the concept of European hegemony in the realm of luxury fashion. It also spotlights Africa's unique position as the global industry shifts towards a more sustainable future. The third and final part ushers the reader into the spectacular world of African fashion today. It showcases a carefully curated set of the continent's most dynamic brands and, through interviews with prominent and inspiring designers, offers rare insight into their ethos and design practice.

This contributed volume serves as an authoritative reference and guide for anyone looking to study or build a brand in Africa. Despite being touted as the ‘last frontier’ of global brands, very little research exists that examines brands and branding in this emerging market. Authors cover crucial topics such as the history of branding in Africa, branding approaches used by start-ups, religious organizations, political parties, and businesses in the informal economies of Africa, as well as marketing Africa as a brand using practical cases, empirical and critical approaches. With the world’s youngest population and the second-fastest growing economies, Africa has quickly become a hotbed for marketing and consumption of local and global brands. While past research has mostly focused on examining the brand image of Africa and African countries, or on branding Africa as a place for tourist consumption, what is missing is a comprehensive guide that discusses the theory and practice of branding and brands in and from Africa. Through theoretical and practical contributions, the authors of this book seek to fill the knowledge gap about branding in and from Africa.

This book is an invaluable repository of knowledge that brings clarity to key issues and trends for practitioners, academics and students of luxury brands. It sets out to decode the luxury markets in the primary emerging markets (BRICs) and provide a rich resume of the key factors that influence the effectiveness of luxury brand strategies.

The Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication is an authoritative and comprehensive guide to research in the academic sub-field of humanitarian communication. It is broadly focused on communication that presents human vulnerability as a cause for public concern and encompasses communication with respect to humanitarian aid and development as well as human rights and "humanitarian" wars. Recent years have seen the expansion of critical scholarship on humanitarian communication across a range of academic fields, sharing recognition of the centrality of media and communications to our understanding of humanitarianism as an agent of transnational power, global governance and cosmopolitan solidarity. The Handbook brings into dialogue these diverse fields, their theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches as well as the public debates that lie at the heart of the contemporary politics of humanitarianism. It consolidates existing knowledge and maps out this emerging field as an important site of interdisciplinary knowledge production on media, communication and humanitarianism. As such, the Handbook is not simply a collection of texts sharing a similar theme. It is a coherent intellectual contribution which systematizes current critical scholarship in terms of Domains, Methods and Issues and sets an agenda of emerging and evolving research priorities in the field. Consisting of 26 chapters written by international scholars, who have contributed to laying the foundation of the field, this volume provides an essential guide to the key ideas, issues, concepts and debates of humanitarian communication.

Africans living in the diaspora have a unique position as potential agents of change in helping to address Africa’s political and socioeconomic challenges. In addition to sending financial remittances, their multiple, hybrid identities in and out of geographical and psychocultural spaces allow them to play a role as cultural and political ambassadors to foster social change and sustainable development back in their African homelands. However, this hybrid position is not without challenges, and this book reflects some of the conundrums faced by members of the diaspora as they negotiate their relationships with their home countries. The author uses her lived experiences and empirical research to ask: are members of the diaspora conduits of Western cultural hegemony at the cost of their traditional preservation and meaningful development in Africa? How does the Western media’s portrayal of Africa as the "Dark Continent" in the 21st century influence their decision-making process to invest back home? How could African nations’ governments manage their relationships with citizens abroad to motivate them to invest in their home countries? How do some citizen-residents in Africa and African Diaspora communities perceive each other in the context of Africa’s development? How could the African Diaspora collaborate with citizen-residents across growth sectors to impact Africa’s development? The book hopes to inspire agents of change within the diaspora and features diverse African entrepreneurs’ success stories and their experiences of tackling these challenges. The book will be of interest to aspiring entrepreneurs, researchers across African studies, and the expanding and vibrant field of diaspora research.