International Journal of Communication 20(2026), Book Review Jiali Fan
Reviewed by
Jiali Fan
University of Cambridge
With creator industries receiving growing academic and political attention, Global South Creator Cultures is an ambitious and timely collection that challenges singular, if not universalizing, assumptions and imaginaries about these rapidly changing industries and forms of labor. Rather than treating monetization, precarity, and algorithmic challenges as universal experiences, the edited volume situates creators’ everyday experiences in India, Turkey, Brazil, Chile, Pakistan, Nigeria, Hong Kong, and mainland China within their specific cultural, social, political, and linguistic conditions. In doing so, it shifts the analytical point of departure away from the platform or technological development alone and toward the existing power relations and labor conditions through which platformized work is experienced. The volume comprises an introduction and conclusion, both written by the editors, Tuğçe Bidav and Smith Mehta, and eight chapters, each offering an exploratory account of how creators in distinctive geographical settings express themselves and sustain their livelihoods through social media platforms.
In both the introduction and conclusion, Bidav and Mehta stress the need for an intervention that multiplies our frames of reference and foregrounds the richness of creators’ experiences. As the editors point out, although media globalization and shared socio-technical affordances produce some common practices, the experiences of individuals embedded within particular local, regional, and national conditions are far from homogeneous. Through a four-part conceptual framework focused on “geographic specificities, the state–platform nexus, the wider sociocultural contexts, and the political economy of language” (p. 1), the volume aims not merely to provide new examples that extend existing research but also to contribute to theory-building from the Global South. While geography is one of the most distinctive categories through which creators’ experiences are differentiated, the editors emphasize that it is neither a simple metaphor nor a fixed entity. Rather, geography draws attention to geopolitically rooted power relations shaped by colonialism, imperialism, shifting positionalities, and persistent inequalities. This mapping of diverse creator cultures also speaks directly to the editors’ effort to challenge intellectual hierarchies by treating contexts often marginalized within global media research as equal reference points for knowledge production.
Chapter 1, by Srikanth Nayaka, focuses on rural village creators in southern India, while chapter 8, by Xiaoting Yu, examines grassroots jiazu (families) creators on the Chinese platform Kuaishou. I discuss these chapters together for two reasons. First, both focus on creators who can be loosely situated within what Lin and de Kloet (2019) call the “unlikely creative class” (p. 1): cultural producers outside urban and middle-class centers who gain new opportunities to engage in cultural production through platform affordances. Second, both case studies reveal collective organizational structures and different forms of relational labor. Nayaka examines how the village itself becomes a brand and how creators adopt strategies including subtitles to overcome linguistic and geographic marginalization. Yu, meanwhile, considers how jiazu creators work through hierarchical, quasi-familial organizational structures that can produce patriarchal relations. Despite the opportunities offered by platforms, both chapters reveal mechanisms of marginalization. Located outside India’s Hindi- and English-language mainstreams, Telugu-speaking village creators face challenges of invisibility and discoverability. In the Chinese case, Yu develops the concept of “algorithmic gentrification” to show how Kuaishou’s changing commercial and algorithmic priorities displace grassroots creator communities in favor of “higher value” content. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate that visibility is largely structured by linguistic and cultural hierarchies, commercial values, and geographically situated inequalities.
Chapter 2, by Elif Birced, and chapter 3, by Issaaf Karhawi, both address how creators perceive and negotiate different forms of precarity, a key condition of creator cultures. Situated in Turkey, where high inflation and currency devaluation erode audiences’ purchasing power and contribute to creators’ income precarity, Birced shows how creators perform relational work to strengthen their bonds with audiences. In this context, monetization is framed as a form of moral support and meaningful participation that can sustain creator-audience relationships. Focusing on Brazil, Karhawi explores how creators negotiate the precarity of visibility through “engagement campaigns.” By publicly inviting audiences to interact with their content, with the possibility of receiving a gift in return, creators cultivate a form of curated reciprocity while presenting these campaigns as authentic and community-building. Both chapters make clear that creators are acutely aware of platforms’ disciplinary power. At the same time, they reveal the creative practices through which creators mitigate precarity and maintain meaningful relationships, even when those practices may reinforce their dependence on platforms.
Chapter 4, by Karis K. Wilson and Arturo Arriagada, and chapter 5, by Elliot Montpellier, further expand our understanding of the term “creator” by examining people who engage in content creation in different capacities and as part of emerging future-of-work imaginaries. Wilson and Arriagada explain how creators in Santiago, Chile, navigate “dual professional lives” (p. 87) across formal employment and content creation. Rather than treating content creation simply as a side hustle, the chapter shows how conventional work and creator labor can feed into one another through the circulation of skills, identities, and cultural capital. At the same time, creators carefully manage the boundaries between the imagined audiences associated with their different professional roles. Similarly concerned with changing structures of work, Montpellier examines how former male television professionals in Pakistan use their production skills to move into creative gig work on freelancing platforms amid the contraction of the country’s legacy television industry. Drawing on conversations conducted over six years, Montpellier reveals not only an institutional shift toward more unstable forms of employment but also Pakistan’s marginal position within regional and global media economies. These chapters show how creator labor is further entangled with existing professions, inequalities, and infrastructures.
Chapter 6, by Jaana Serres, and chapter 7, by Cecilia Ka Hei Wong, both pay significant attention to political and institutional conditions, although they approach the “state-platform nexus” (p. 14) in different ways. Focusing on creators in Lagos, Nigeria, Serres shows how they articulate a patriotic ethos to reshape global representations of Africa through consumerism, entrepreneurial aspiration, and Pentecostal ethics in a context in which the state has failed to provide a credible sense of collective hope. However, Serres argues that Nigerian creator culture embodies a relation of “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011) that generates hope while alienating individuals from more radical transformations of existing political-economic relations. Examining overlapping systems of governance, Wong uses the case study of Emilia Wong to demonstrate how a feminist activist creator negotiates gendered hate, algorithmic moderation by U.S.-based platforms, and political regulation from the Chinese state. Emilia Wong’s practices of “wilful exposing” can be seen as a form of feminist resistance that challenges normative femininity, surveillance, and the forces seeking to regulate or silence her. The author also disrupts the frequently assumed boundary between the Global South and the Global North by demonstrating the interwoven realities of “colonial forces/Global North and China/Global South” (p. 149) within Hong Kong’s digital sphere. Read together, these chapters reveal that creator agency is largely shaped by state intervention and gendered violence, as well as the historically situated ethical frameworks.
This well-written edited volume nevertheless raises a question that I often ask myself: What may be lost when contextually rich empirical analysis becomes an endpoint in itself, particularly in research on the Global South? The volume carefully avoids inappropriate generalization and repeatedly acknowledges the risks of universalizing frameworks. However, as Chua (2015) reminds us, “to overemphasise the non-transferability of local concepts is to condemn local scholarship to the fate of being ‘unique’ and, therefore, ‘interesting’ in an exotic way, but ultimately irrelevant to others” (p. 78). An overemphasis on uniqueness may therefore perpetuate a division of intellectual labor in which Southern scholars are expected primarily to provide “context,” while Global North scholarship continues to treat its own contexts as unmarked and its conclusions as broadly generalizable. I acknowledge that the editors seek to place the chapters “in reference to one another rather than in comparison” (p. 181), which is a thoughtful methodological choice. However, I wish the conclusion had pushed the cross-case synthesis further by thinking about how concepts developed from individual cases can travel across contexts without reproducing either universalism or exceptionalism.
Overall, Global South Creator Cultures is conceptually and empirically rich. It will be of considerable interest not only to students and scholars of media, communication, cultural studies, sociology, and digital labor but also to broader readers seeking to understand the rapidly evolving dynamics of creator cultures and platforms. Most importantly, the volume demonstrates that platforms do not produce a homogeneous creator culture. Instead, creator experiences are continually shaped by the cultural, political, social, linguistic, and economic conditions within which individuals live and work.
References
Berlant, L. G. (2011). Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Chua, B. H. (2015). Inter-Asia referencing and shifting frames of comparison. In C. Johnson, V. Mackie, & T. Morris-Suzuki (Eds.), The social sciences in the Asian century (pp. 67–80). Canberra, Australia: ANU Press.
Lin, J., & de Kloet, J. (2019). Platformization of the unlikely creative class: Kuaishou and Chinese digital cultural production. Social Media + Society, 5(4), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119883430
Copyright © 2026 (Jiali Fan, [email protected]). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at https://ijoc.org.
https://doi.org/10.65476/gy6br160