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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.
About the author
Roopali Mukherjee (Editor) 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.
Sarah Banet-Weiser (Editor) Sarah Banet-Weiser is Professor and Head of the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. She is the author of four books, including
Authentic(TM): The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (2012), which won the International Communication Association's Outstanding Book Award,
The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (1999),
Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (2007), and
Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (2018). She is the co-editor of
Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting (2007) and
Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times (2012), both available from NYU Press.
Summary
Discusses what happens when the most common way we participate in social activism is by buying something
