Commodity Activism Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times

"Without doubt this important collection of essays will contribute significantly to the new and growing field of 'critical consumer studies'." - J.R. Mitrano (CHOICE) "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-Weisers 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) "Commodity Activism will be out of interest to a wide range of scholars, including those focused on critical/consumer studies, American studies, media studies, and critical rhetorical studies. Any academic interested in exploring consumer politics, or contemporary trends in social activism, or in constituting social controversy, will find this text replete with starting points for future scholarship." (Journal of American Culture)

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 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.