Consuming Visions: New Essays on the Politics of Consumption in Modern America

The United States is the quintessential consumer society. This collection of essays brings together a new set of American and European voices from across the disciplinary spectrum of the humanities and social sciences to explore in innovative and challenging ways the consuming visions that have informed American political, social, and cultural life in the twentieth century. Ranging in subject matter from the anti-chain store movement that swept across small-town America in the 1920s and 1930s to the bling aesthetic in contemporary African American film, these essays explore how questions of consumption have been imagined, understood, and contested. While the collection coheres around the contributors’ common concern with how consumption has been-and is-political, its distinctiveness lies in the broad sweep of its disciplinary range. Furthermore, Consuming Visions illuminates a wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the politics of consumption, with contributions from legal, social and political historians, and scholars from media and communications studies. Providing fresh perspectives on one the most dynamic sub-fields in American Studies, Consuming Visions will appeal to students and academics with an interest in consumerism and consumption in the twentieth-century United States.