Consumer Capitalism Research Articles

Sovereign Sugar: Industry and Environment in Hawai‘i by Carol MacLennan (review)

Reviewed by: Sovereign Sugar: Industry and Environment in Hawai‘i by Carol MacLennan Richard P. Tucker Sovereign Sugar: Industry and Environment in Hawai‘i. By Carol MacLennan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014. x + 378 pp. Appendices. Maps. Notes. Illustrated. Bibliography. Index. $39.00 cloth Much has been written about the sugar barons of Hawai‘i and the vast sugar empire that they created from the late 1800s onward, shaping large areas of the islands’ landscapes and the politics that made the transformation possible. The story is central to the islands’ position as the crossroads of the Pacific world. It includes the incursions of haoles from mainland North America, the import of the Asian majority of today’s population, and the collapse of the native Hawaiian population with its finely tuned integration with land and sea. But no previous publication has unified all these dimensions of modern Hawai‘i’s history into as lucid a synthesis as Sovereign Sugar. This impressive book is the result of historical anthropologist Carol MacLennan’s long years [End Page 217] of immersion in the lives of the islands’ peoples and their ecological settings. She writes that this is not just another history of the sugar industry, but “what is historically important is the complex tapestry of social and natural forces that shaped sugar’s history, often altering its direction and dictating its dynamic” (p. 7). She asserts persuasively that the sugar-dominated transformation of the islands’ life in the modern era was not inevitable, as previous writers on King Sugar have often used as their plot line, but was the result of interactions among all the ethnic and economic groups on the islands. Nature herself has also been a player, since natural systems have their own processes, whether untouched by humans and their associated (introduced, invasive) species of plants and animals, or severely distorted by the wide range of invading species. Professor MacLennan sets the scene with a clear and vivid description of Hawaiian culture and its adaptation to land and water resources before interactions with Europeans began in the 1770s. She places this cultural story within the exceptionally rich literature of Hawai‘i’s island biogeography, archaeology and human ecology. The chapters that follow trace the fundamental ecological implications of the transformative power of haole civilization, with its radically different concept of land ownership. The author introduces four founding missionary families (the Cookes, Castles, Alexanders, and Baldwins), who brought a “civilizing mission” to both non-Protestant peoples and the natural world. Together they created a “powerhouse network” nicknamed the “Big Five” companies (p. 52), integrating the islands into the international capitalist consumer economy. Their controlling political influence, first under the independent Hawaiian kingdom, and then after U.S. annexation in 1892, centered in the remarkable Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association (HSPA), which became an internationally leading organization for scientific management of land, forest cover, and water. MacLennan shows convincingly that from today’s sustainability criteria, HSPA preserved forest watersheds, in contrast to forestry management on the U.S. mainland, which lay far greater emphasis on timber production. But in this HSPA worked in close conjunction with the sugar interests, rather than small farmers and non-white populations, to implement advances in agro-industrial science. This collaboration necessitated political power, controlling laws and their implementation for environmental policy and management, which was critically important for the distribution of the islands’ forest and water resources. The industry evolved in two broad phases; first the nineteenth century commercial plantations, and then more modern industrial operations, which were far more efficient. The era after 1900 saw major advances in public [End Page 218] health for the workers, as well as sugar production as efficient as any plantations around the world, for markets primarily in the western U.S. But the sugar mono-crop continued to divert vast amounts of water to irrigation, as well as struggling to maintain soil fertility. This account integrates all the islands, as the narrative moves from one plantation to another, one watershed to another, from O‘ahu to Kaua‘i to Maui and Hawai‘i Island. MacLennan describes four plantation centers, each with its central coastal town, and the workers’ villages that spread...

Politizacija senzibiliteta - efekat spektakla kolonijalnog carstva 1930-ih u Seoulu

This paper aims to analyse the phenomena of the consumption culture in terms of the spectacle effects of the colonial empire, which were unprecedented prosperity in the 1930s in Seoul. The phenomena could be interpreted as the politicization of sensuality. The spatial change intensified the colonial differentiation of city that was segregated into the Southern Village for Japanese and the Northern Village for Koreans. It facilitated the modern homogenization of the urban space. Especially, department stores were invigorated as a powerful apparatus for consumer capitalism, inviting Koreans to Japanese street, transcending the spatial border of the colonial segregation. Manipulating the exhibition techniques of department store, Japanese Empire built up the visually attractive self-representation image, encouraging the colonized to experience the fascination of modem urban culture as crowds or spectators in the street. The spectacle of the Empire made new lines of cultural distinction based on the differentiation of social stratum inside the colonized community.

Portraits of (Un)settlement

This essay considers the production of racialized masculinities in the contemporary artwork of the Singaporean-born queer diasporic artist Dominique Hui and the queer Aboriginal/Cree artist Kent Monkman. Recent debates in anti-racist feminist, queer, and Native feminist scholarship illuminate how diasporic and Indigenous groups are unevenly positioned within a framework of neoliberal multiculturalism and settler state colonialism in the Americas. Accordingly, there are important distinctions in the way that queer diasporic and queer Native artists respond to and challenge hetero- and homonormative models of citizenship in Canada. I examine how Hui's and Monkman's works reflect and mediate the interactions of multiple racialized masculinities in an identity-driven and individualized culture of neoliberalism and global consumer capitalism. Overall, I suggest that applying Native feminist critiques to a relational analysis of queer diasporic and Indigenous masculinities can unsettle and imagine new possibilities for “multicultural” solidarity in Canada—and beyond.

Faith Matters: Towards a Public Missiology in the Midst of the Ecological Crisis

Abstract: The article examines public missiology in the light of the ecological crisis by situating public missiology in the larger context of public theology. It responds to the challenge of finding ways for Christian communities to act in the light of climate change. It notes developments in public theology, as well as the rise and dominance of a consumer capitalist economic story that frustrates action for the integrity of God's creation. It identifies public missiology with a locus in public theology. It distinguishes public missiology as the discipline that involves the church in active engagement. Drawing on the seminal thought of David Bosch and the work of Gregory Leffel in public Christian activism, the article argues for five dimensions in public missiology, which are inextricably intertwined. They include a public disposition of ongoing repentance, a humble and prayerful engagement within Christian community, an active engagement with the ecological crisis in the world (evangelism in community), a public telling of the story of the meaning of God's creation (proclamation), and a call to turn toward action for the integrity of creation (conversion). Out of the interplay of these dimensions, through theological reflection and careful consideration of critical social theory, a new public missiological story is to be woven that can capture the imagination of people, both of faith and no faith, to action for a healed creation.

Review: Capitalism's obsessions lead society awry

Review of: Beyond Consumer Capitalism: Media and the Limits to Imagination, by Justin Lewis. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. 232 pp. ISBN 978-0-7456-5024-1When critics take aim at a society gone awry through an obsession with consumption, wealth and individualism, their arguments are usually about political interests and structural forces. Justin Lewis’s book is a breath of fresh air, not only because it’s beautifully written and argued, but because he asks us to think about these pressing problems on an imaginative level. Imagine, he asks, if advertisements were banned? Or imagine if advertising creatives were told to produce any story rather than one aimed at selling?

The Body and the City Project: Young Black Women Making Space, Community, and Love in Newark, New Jersey

The article considers how The Body and the City Project, a performance ethnographic initiative active between 2009 and 2011 with Black women and girls in Newark, provides a model for disrupting the neoliberal co-optation of public space, and the brown and Black female bodies that move through and occupy these spaces. It explains how the project emerged as a response to the ways in which Black women and girls experience the changing nature of safety, access, mobility, ownership, and belonging in postindustrial Newark. Tracing the project’s development demonstrates how the integration of performance methodologies within the context of feminist ethnographic practices provides the space to centralize collective identities and community accountability in ways that directly challenge notions of competition, individualism, and the capitalist consumption of space that define the contours of contemporary neoliberal practices, particularly in urban areas experiencing actual or perceived demographic shifts. The article seeks to centralize performance as a mode of investigation in feminist ethnography; better understand and more concretely identify what nurtures Black women and girls’ community engagement; and inspire new solutions to the issues they identify as examples of injustice, with distinctly neoliberal roots, in their local communities.

Consciousness displaced: Art and technology education/collaboration for an aesthetic of liberation

Abstract Modernity’s grand plans were designed far from where we stand today. The prerogative of progress as an ideological imperative that defined colonialism as a natural balance between the ‘developed’ societies’ moral duty to rescue ‘underdeveloped’ peoples from their fate of myth and superstition created education. Education that functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic and aesthetics of the status quo and to bring about conformity to the hegemonic cultural form of western technological consumer capitalism. This article explores whose education and for whom was it created by the imperial ideologies, not of nineteenth- or twentieth-century colonialism but for twenty-first-century western technological consumer neo-colonialism. From South Africa’s Apartheid era Liberation before education to Paulo Freire’s practice of freedom, this article questions the practices of new technologies, art and technology education at the edge of the disenfranchised. The traditional frameworks of education are on an ideological and methodological crisis worldwide. The hegemony of knowledge has ruptured away from academia. The linearity of thought has burst open as an omni-directional array. The hierarchy of authorship is contested and the audiences are becoming users and participants. As the ubiquity of information technologies, the emergence of connectedness, cheap chips and the presage of the Internet of things permeates every aspect of a particular section of people clustered in specific cities and spread out around the globe, a unique consciousness is evolving where a new collaboration paradigm is gaining a place of balance between us, nature and our technologies, our positions on social justice, and is evolving a symbiotic outlook at other cultures and societies.

Shopping for entertainment: malls and multiplexes in Sydney, Australia

ABSTRACTThis article examines multiplex cinema development and its close association with shopping centre expansion programmes in Australia. The article argues that while multiplex cinema construction in Australia echoed international developments, it also resulted from coalescing interests between local retail developers and film exhibitors, was guided by planning legislation and shaped by escalating institutional investment in the retail industry. Data mapping the emergence, growth and consolidation of multiplexes in Sydney, Australia's largest city, is used to illustrate this development, contributing to urban histories of the city and understandings of the ways in which its contours have been reshaped by consumer capitalism.

"Nanna Style": The Countercultural Politics of Retro Femininities

Over the past two decades in the West, practices of ethical consumption have become increasingly visible within mainstream consumer culture (Lewis and Potter). While they manifest in a variety of forms, such practices are frequently articulated to politics of anti-consumerism, environmentalism, and sustainable consumption through which lifestyle choices are conceived as methods for investing in—and articulating—ethical and social concerns. Such practices are typically understood as both a reflection of the increasing global influence of neoliberal, consumer-oriented modes of citizenship and a response to the destabilisation of capitalism’s certainties in the wake of ongoing climate change and the global financial crisis (Castells et al.; Miller).

Spoils of the Sign: Group Material's Americana, 1985

A motley grid of things set against clashing bands of homely wallpaper: The dense array was far from comfortable. This was Americana, Group Material's site-specific exhibition project for the 1985 Whitney Biennial in which it took over the museum's lobby gallery. Facing the entrance hung Laurie Simmons's Tourism: Las Vegas (1984), a large-format cibachrome print whose appropriated, rephotographed imagery bet on surface and illusion: A trio of plastic figurines strut toward the rear-projected neon glow of Vegas, wagering class aspiration in all its gendered trappings against the highs and lows of American consumer capitalism. A few paces to the left, five loaves of packaged sliced bread posed a strange rejoinder: Wonder, Arnold, Pepperidge Farm, pinned by their cellophane crests to form a graduated queue, brought out marginal differences in color scheme and logo design. (At left, Peter Nagy's depiction of a Pepperidge Farm industrial plant underscored the point.) Pop lurked; Andy Warhol's 1960s soup cans belabored brand to similar effect, registering the outstripping of substance by signs at the most intimate level of bodily nourishment.

NEW BELGRADE AFTER 1999: Spatial Violence as De-Socialisation, De-Romanisation, and De-Historisation

New Belgrade after 1999 is associated with the transition from a socialist and single-party state to a consumer capitalist and multi-party system, these latter features perceived as indicators of democracy. This text asks if and how this transitional period points to NATO's 1999 bombing campaign still being in-operation through spatial violence by other means, with these means related to the negation of difference and the transformation of everyday life and social values. Might this spatial violence be even more coercive than that of the war as it manifests through the convergence of military, legal, governmental, and economic entities of international “redevelopment” agencies working in the name of “security” along with the Serbian government? The focus here is on the post-1999 transformation and re-modernisation of New Belgrade as an elimination of difference through processes of de-socialisation, de-Romanisation, and de-historisation connected with neo-liberal privatisation.

Consumer Citizenship and Cross‐Class Activism: The Case of the National Consumers' League, 1899–1918

Political consumerism is often criticized for its failure to cross class lines, a failure linked to the economic resources and cultural capital of affluent consumers. The early history of the National Consumers' League (NCL) illustrates how an alternative model of consumer citizenship can lead privileged shoppers to draw social boundaries in different ways. The NCL included lower‐class women and children as beneficiaries and occasional allies in consumer campaigns, but distanced itself from the organized labor movement. This alternative model of political consumerism is traced to the gender and class cultures of reformist women in the Progressive Era.

Renewing a historical legacy: Tourism, leisure shopping and urban branding in Paris

This article discusses a form of urban tourism branding based on the archetypical form of consumerism: leisure shopping. Commodity fetishism is instrumental not only to increasing mainstream fashion sales but also to rejuvenating and multiplying city images on the global competitive market. Drawing from fieldwork performed in Paris, the article analyses and discusses the strategies developed by key players to promote leisure shopping for urban tourists. It specifically focuses on the actions of public-led tourism marketing organisations. Paris is historically renowned as a capital of style and a commercial metropolis, which can easily be used as a basis to develop urban branding strategies for promoting tourism. However, urban branding based on leisure shopping per se was rarely fostered until recently. Previous theoretic reflections on urban development and consumption – leading to debates on the “fantasy city”, the “cultural-creative city” and “local shopping streets” – provide the analytical basis for understanding the promotion of leisure shopping as an urban tourism branding strategy in Paris and the changing relations between urban political economy and consumer capitalism.

A Critical Pedagogy against Consumer Capitalism: A Normative Approach

Critical pedagogues have extensively criticized the commercialization of education; however, their argument has remained at the level of critique. As will be argued, a normative conception a deep socialist democracy based upon human flourishing is needed in order for critical pedagogues to critique consumer capitalism’s impact on education. However, critical pedagogues have not developed this position, thus they are unable to normatively describe the problems of a commercialized education. This paper fills this gap by providing a normative, yet critical, argument against the commercialization of education. Section one sets up the argument by clarifying terms. Section two explains critical pedagogue’s argument against a commercialized education and why this argument is normatively inconsistent. Section three briefly develops the argument for a deep socialist democracy and outlines a normative framework for a critical pedagogy against consumerism.

Beyond authenticity: a visual-material analysis of locality in the global redesign of Starbucks stores

In this article, the authors examine the global store design strategy launched by Starbucks in 2009 in the wake of the economic crisis, increasing brand dilution, and growing competition. They offer a visual-material analysis of the corporation’s efforts to create a global aesthetic grounded in locality, with an in-depth focus on meaning potentials of materiality and community found across the four store redesigns that were unveiled in Seattle, the coffee company’s hometown, and which functioned as prototypes for store design across the United States, Europe and Asia. They then critically engage Starbucks’ rhetoric/discourse of locality in relation to the more widespread notion of authenticity and argue that, while authenticity is rooted in textual and symbolic arrangements, locality operates in the realm of emplaced and embodied claims of difference. Shifting from authenticity to locality in design and branding practices alters critical engagements and everyday relationships with global consumer capitalism, insofar as this may be increasingly entrenched with vernacular expressions of cosmopolitanism.

Religious Non-Places: Corporate Megachurches and Their Contributions to Consumer Capitalism

The corporate megachurch represents a pecuniarily driven institution that both emphasizes marketing for the purposes of constant growth, and focuses on the manufacture and delivery of consumer-centric goods and services. This article draws on the theory of the non-place as conceptualized by Augé, who argues that the non-place is a direct effect of contemporary capitalism’s incessant incursion into ever more areas of life. The non-place refers to any variety of transitory sites that lack historical, cultural, or geographic reference points, and while they seem to be everywhere one is left with the sense of being ‘nowhere’ in particular. One such place that lacks distinguishing features and fails to provide any contextual reference is the corporate megachurch. Because of its strategic work to distance itself from traditional Christian churches and focus instead on creating homologies with entertainment, self-help, and retail, the non-place church normalizes the banality of consumer capitalism.

Surveillance Capitalism: Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Digital Age

The United States came out of the Second World War as the hegemonic power in the world economy. The war had lifted the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression by providing the needed effective demand in the form of endless orders for armaments and troops. Real output rose by 65 percent between 1940 and 1944, and industrial production jumped by 90 percent. At the immediate end of the war, due to the destruction of the European and Japanese economies, the United States accounted for over 60 percent of world manufacturing output. The very palpable fear at the top of society as the war came to a close was that of a reversion to the pre-war situation in which domestic demand would be insufficient to absorb the enormous and growing potential economic surplus generated by the production system, thereby leading to a renewed condition of economic stagnation and depression.… Postwar planners in industry and government moved quickly to stabilize the system through the massive promotion of a sales effort in the form of a corporate marketing revolution based in Madison Avenue, and through the creation of a permanent warfare state, dedicated to the imperial control of world markets and to fighting the Cold War, with its headquarters in the Pentagon. The sales effort and the military-industrial complex constituted the two main surplus-absorption mechanisms (beyond capitalist consumption and investment) in the U.S. economy in the first quarter-century after the Second World War.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

From Activist to Entrepreneur: Peace One Day and the Changing Persona of the Social Campaigner

From Activist to Entrepreneur: Peace One Day and the Changing Persona of the Social Campaigner

Fashioning Cosmopolitan Citizenship: Transnational Gazes and the Production of Romance in Asian/American Bridal Photography

This article explores bridal makeovers, the visual production of bodily transformations in these practices, and the documentation of those transformations through bridal photography. It argues that photography performs three main intertwining functions. First, wedding photographs naturalize gender, emphasizing youth and beauty of the bridal body. Second, fashion photography taken of Asian American couples prior to the wedding functions simultaneously to demystify race by incorporating the subjects into narratives of heterosexual romance. Third, in creating these images, Asians and Asian Americans fashion themselves as cosmopolitan, global bodies able to traverse class, race, and nation through their participation in consumer capitalism.

소비와 수요의 측면에서 나타나는 국내 아파트의 일상의 소외에 관한 연구

Korean Apartment shows the alienation of everyday life in the area of consumption and demand. This kind of alienation comes from the consumer capitalism and consumption culture and has relation to the commodification of urban housing. Therefore the purpose of this study is to show the way social structure impacts the everyday life of Korean apartment in the aspects as commodification for middle-class consumers, pre-construction sales model houses, tools for personal assets and a status symbol, and stylized life cultural equalization. And the fundamental contradiction is identified between the characteristics of the apartment as the homogeneous, economical and standardized product of mass production and the individual desire to be differentiated from others which is a prevalent phenomenon in the consumer society.