Commodity Activism

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.

Buying (RED) products-from Gap T-shirts to Apple-to fight AIDS.Drinking a "Caring Cup" of coffee at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf tosupport fair trade. Driving a Toyota Prius to fight global warming. Allthese commonplace activities point to a central feature of contemporaryculture: the most common way we participate in social activism is bybuying something.Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser have gathered an exemplarygroup of scholars to explore this new landscape through a series of casestudies of "commodity activism." Drawing from television, filmconsumer activist campaigns, and cultures of celebrity and corporatepatronage, the essays take up examples such as the Dove "Real Beauty"campaign, sex positive retail activism, ABC's Extreme Home Makeover, andAngelina Jolie as multinational celebrity missionary.Exploring the complexities embedded in contemporary political activism, Commodity Activismreveals the workings of power and resistance as well as citizenship andsubjectivity in the neoliberal era. Refusing to simply positionpolitics in opposition to consumerism, this collection teases out therelationships between material cultures and political subjectivitiesarguing that activism may itself be transforming into a brandedcommodity.