ABSTRACT
In this essay, I juxtapose cultural analysis, critical theory, and a Global South perspective to recuperate the critical potential of working with the limits of our methods. My object of analysis is “Bannatyne Takes on Big Tobacco,” a 2008 episode of BBC’s This World , which indexes a set of contradictions proper to the era Mark Fisher termed “capitalist realism.” Interested in Africa’s role as the constitutive exclusion of capitalist realism, I employ the concept-based methodology of cultural analysis for a close reading across disciplinary boundaries while simultaneously benefiting from critical theory’s approach to particulars as symptoms of a systemic totality. The Global South operates as a perspectival locus, interrupting semiotic closure to include colonialism as the structural causation of capitalism.
