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| Subjects: Media Studies, Cultural Studies, American Studies |
| Part of the Critical Cultural Communication Series |
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Buying (RED) products—from Gap T-shirts to Apple—to fight AIDS.
Drinking a “Caring Cup” of coffee at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf to
support fair trade. Driving a Toyota Prius to fight global warming. All
these commonplace activities point to a central feature of contemporary
culture: the most common way we participate in social activism is by
buying something.
Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser have gathered an exemplary
group of scholars to explore this new landscape through a series of case
studies of “commodity activism.” Drawing from television, film,
consumer activist campaigns, and cultures of celebrity and corporate
patronage, the essays take up examples such as the Dove “Real Beauty”
campaign, sex positive retail activism, ABC’s Extreme Home Makeover, and
Angelina Jolie as multinational celebrity missionary.
Exploring the complexities embedded in contemporary political activism, Commodity Activism
reveals the workings of power and resistance as well as citizenship and
subjectivity in the neoliberal era. Refusing to simply position
politics in opposition to consumerism, this collection teases out the
relationships between material cultures and political subjectivities,
arguing that activism may itself be transforming into a branded
commodity. |
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Roopali Mukherjee is associate professor of Media Studies at
the City University of New York, Queens College, and the author of The Racial Order of Things: Cultural Imaginaries of the Post-Soul Era. View all books by Roopali Mukherjee
Sarah Banet-Weiser is Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (1999) and Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (2007), and the co-editor of Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting (2007) and Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times (2012), both available from NYU Press. View all books by Sarah Banet-Weiser |
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| | “Commodity activism has a long history but never has its significance been more complex to unravel than today, when the boundaries and direction of political action are unclear, commercial forces mobilize consumers’ values to secure their emotional loyalty, and individual consumers hope their choices mean that ‘something is being done.’ Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser's smart, empirically rich and globally wide-ranging new collection provides us with very welcome coordinates in this difficult terrain.” | | -Nick Couldry, author of Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism |
| | "Commodity Activism is eminently useful. Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser’s collection is animportant intervention into what had become a tired debate about political agency and consumer culture. It is also a very timely anthology, helping us better understand the practices of a current generation ofactivists who recognize that the terrain upon which they struggle is not some idealized land of pure politics outside the influence of consumer culture, but instead, a challenging topography of brands and logos, style and story, celebrity and spectacle." | | -International Journal of Communication |
| | "Without doubt this important collection of essays will contribute significantly to the new and growing field of 'critical consumer studies'." | | -J.R. Mitrano, CHOICE |
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