Consuming the Romantic Utopia in Africa through Reality Television: Our Perfect Wedding

Reality television has challenged our understanding of modern life since its rapid rise in the early 2000s. Reality wedding shows, in particular, claim to portray the authentic expression of love shared by the participants. Research within this genre of reality television has mainly focused on audience reception as well as engagement with the content. However, the steady proliferation of reality wedding shows in Africa has gone largely uncritically celebrated as a sign of romantic love on the continent. Through a multimodal critical discourse analysis of episodes from the South African, Kenyan and Nigerian wedding show Our Perfect Wedding, we argue that the production choices of wedding reality shows are not value free but represent a profit logic co-opting of love by consumerist capitalism in order to perpetuate its existence even within non-Western contexts. We borrow from the concepts of conspicuous consumption and utopia to argue that audiences of reality television wedding shows in Africa are invited to consume displays of opulent consumption under the guise of celebrating utopian love.