Apologies for cross-posting. My new book’s just been
published:
More information here: http://www.benpitcher.com/
Video: http://goo.gl/D1InFc
Read the first 30 pages here: http://goo.gl/1PzGoh
Blurb:
From the rise of Nordic noir to a taste for street food, from practices of natural gardening to the aesthetics of children's TV, contemporary culture is saturated with racial meanings. By consuming race we make sense of other groups and cultures, communicate our own identities, express our needs and desires, and discover new ways of thinking and being.
This book explores how the meanings of race are made and remade in acts of creative consumption. Ranging across the terrain of popular culture, and finding race in some unusual and unexpected places, it offers fresh and innovative ways of thinking about the centrality of race to our lives.
Consuming Race provides an accessible and highly readable overview of the latest research and a detailed reading of a diverse range of objects, sites and practices. It gives students of sociology, media and cultural studies the opportunity to make connections between academic debates and their own everyday practices of consumption.
Advance praise:
Consuming Race will be of enormous use and value to
students and researchers of race and ethnicity in all areas of culture. It is
clear and incisive, yet well theorised and rigorous, and it insists on and lays
out a powerful argument: no matter how much we might want to hope, believe or
fantasise otherwise, race will not go away. Race is always going to be a
central topic to any serious consideration of media, culture and society, and
Pitcher's book offers a clear and engaging set of readings of race, drawn from
many areas of mainstream popular culture and our daily lives.
Dr Paul Bowman, Director of Postgraduate Research, Journalism Media and Cultural Studies School, Cardiff University
Consuming Race draws our attention to the ways race
finds its way into even the most banal aspects of everyday consumer life.
Highly readable, patient, thorough, and complex, the book reveals (old) even as
it creates (new) articulations. Defining its terms in a most clear and informed
manner, the book emphasizes the presence of race wherever capital flows.
Kent A. Ono, Professor and Chair of Communication,
University of Utah