The black and the beautiful: perceptions of (a) new Generation(s)

Abstract

This article sets out from the underlying belief that soap operas, like many other forms of popular media, play a role in ordering and rearranging people's everyday life routines, and inquires into some of the ways a South African soap opera functions as a barometer and a vehicle of constancy and change in contemporary South Africa. Focusing specifically on the longstanding South African soap opera, Generations, the article assesses this soap opera as both a product of post-apartheid South Africa and as a mechanism which maintains, and promotes changes in, its viewers’ preferences, beliefs and patterns of everyday life social behaviour. Following Robert Foster's argument on commercial technologies as conducive to constructing ‘national’ or collective entities (Foster 1999: 266–69; 2002: 69), the soap opera is regarded here as a ‘commercial’ technology through which a diversity of viewers are able to constitute a sense of themselves as sharing a wide range of discursive patterns, images, beliefs and lifestyle practices, even as it also motivates them towards social mobility, social action and social change.

In terms of this themed issue's focus on cultural economy, the article further considers, albeit partially, the extent to which the production and consumption of Generations is driven by received political economic determinates (i.e. prescribed and shifting guidelines by the South African national broadcaster, the SABC, regarding how the popular media should be configured) which have themselves been transformed into a set of strategically managed socio-cultural determinants. The latter address, for instance, how the popular media in South Africa, and soap opera in particular, have been brought to bear on perceptions of individual selfhood and collective identity among consumers/viewers, and how socio-political change in South Africa is also reshaping representations of collective and individual aspirations of social mobility in popular media discourses and among the consumers thereof.

Drawing on ethnographic television audience research, and a range of recent inquiries into South African soap opera by local scholars, I assess how the perceptions and viewing experiences of a group of young adult (female and male), black South African viewers of Generations interviewed for the present study, attest to some of the ways in which young adult South Africans are coping, through their viewing experiences, with the socio-cultural contradictions of South Africa's transforming society.

Keywords:

• audience ethnography
• multiculturalism and race
• soap opera