Consumption for the common good? Commodity biography film in an age of postconsumerism

Public Culture

Volumn 23, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 573-602

  Wenzel, Jennifer ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84855678097     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: 15278018     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-1336426     Document Type: Article

References (63)

1. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, 3 vols., trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International, 1967), 1:71.
2. Marx, Capital, 1:83
3. Whereas the Loango tusks bear the narrative of the history of which they are a part, the whale parts on Moby-Dick's Pequod are "trophies" that not only begin to turn the ship into a whale but also are implied to have some relation to narrative and the ship's own history
4. The Pequod's "quaintness of both material and device" is described in terms of the decorative, representational aesthetic of the grotesque and compared favorably to the bedstead upon which a medieval Icelandic hero carved images of his exploits (Melville, Moby-Dick, 59)
5. In an earlier guise, the tusks actually did speak: art historians surmise that the tusks carved for Europeans evolved out of an earlier practice of carving tusks as oliphants, side-blown horns with holes carved for use in Kongo royal courts
6. Nichole Bridges, "Kongo Ivories," in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/kong/hd_kong.htm (accessed April 2, 2011).
7. Bridges, "Kongo Ivories"
8. Marx, Capital, 1:84
9. Marx, Capital, 1:107
10. Zoë S. Strother, "Dancing on the Knife of Power: Comedy, Narcissism, and Subversion in the Portrayals of Europeans and Americans by Central Africans," in Nii O. Quarcoopome, ed., Through African Eyes: The European in African Art, 1500 to Present (Detroit: Detroit Institute of the Arts, 2010), 52.
11. My own view is that both modes of reading are available; the syntagmatic, narrative relationship among the figures along the spiral seems primary to the paradigmatic/juxtaposed relationship along the vertical axis, even if, from a single vantage point, the narrative can be read only in fragments. That Strother's thesis is not universally accepted by art historians is evident in the National Museum of African Art's title for an online exhibit of a Loango tusk: A Spiral of History.
12. See africa.si.edu/exhibits/loango/ltusk.htm (accessed April 2, 2011).
13. Life and Debt, dir. Stephanie Black (Tuff Gong Pictures, Kingston, Jamaica, 2001).
14. Darwin's Nightmare, dir. Hubert Sauper (Mille et Une Productions, Paris, France, 2004).
15. Black Gold, dir. Marc Francis and Nick Francis (Fulcrum Productions, Santa Monica, Calif., 2006).
16. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 6
17. MacCannell, Tourist, 6
18. David Harvey, "Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80 (1990): 423
19. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Plume, 1988)
20. Kincaid, A Small Place, 80 - 81
21. Bill Nichols, "The Voice of Documentary," Film Quarterly 36, no. 3 (1983): 17 - 30.
22. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Criticism, Feminism, and the Institution," interview with Elizabeth Grosz, in Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, and Academics, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 163.
23. Priti Ramamurthy, "Why Is Buying a 'Madras' Cotton Shirt a Political Act? A Feminist Commodity Chain Analysis," Feminist Studies 30 (2004): 741
24. I'm troping on the Delaware River Bridge in Trenton, New Jersey, on which Trenton Makes, the World Takes has been inscribed in neon since 1935. Trenton adopted this motto in 1910, asserting its prominence in a phase of global capitalism that preceded the deindustrialization of the Global North.
25. Commodity chain analysis is a social science genre that tracks value creation through differentiated stages of production that are often globally dispersed (Ramamurthy, "Why Is Buying," 739). Such analyses tend to be linear and unidirectional, "with an identifiable beginning from raw material to finished product and the orderly transmission of value from labor to capital" (747). Their argumentative structure echoes the Fordist logic of assembly: from cotton seed to camp shirt, or cocoa pod to chocolate bar.
26. Marx, Capital, 1:72
27. Marx, Capital, 1:760, 3:830
28. The credits identify this film as Invaders: Animal Invaders/The Freshwater Killers (International, Tele Images, Paris, 2000)
29. Writing about contemporary young Africans' appeals for inclusion in "modern" life as a desire for global citizenship, James Ferguson argues that the ethical import of such appeals can be difficult to parse from above, because they may sound like mere attempts to mimic the West through consumption
30. James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 155 - 75.
31. B. Ruby Rich, "Documentary Disciplines: An Introduction," Cinema Journal 46, no. 1 (2006): 112.
32. Chinua Achebe, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness," in Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965 - 1987 (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 1 - 20
33. Olivier Bartlet, "The Ambiguity of Darwin's Nightmare," trans. Kyana LeMaitre, Africultures, April 1, 2006, www.africultures.com/php/index.php?nav=article&no=5745 (accessed April 2, 2011).
34. Hubert Sauper, "Filming in the Heart of Darkness," darwinsnightmare.com/darwin/html/startset.htm (accessed April 2, 2011).
35. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (1902; repr., New York: Norton, 2006), 15.
36. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 60
37. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 64
38. The phrase is Lynda Prescott's. On the place of the Congo in the European imagination, see Jennifer Wenzel, "Remembering the Past's Future: Anti-imperialist Nostalgia and Some Versions of the Third World," Cultural Critique 62 (2006): 1 - 29.
39. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 34
40. For an inimitable and indispensable account of the aesthetic/affective and economic aspects of coffee as commodity, twinned like the two halves of a coffee bean, see Peter Hitchcock, "Joe: The Architectonic of a Commodity," in his Imaginary States: Studies in Cultural Transnationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 153 - 83
41. The sacks and the wheat are supplied by the US Agency for International Development (USAID); although a small USAID logo appears on the bottom of the sacks, "USA" is printed in outsized letters at the top
42. Ramamurthy, "Why Is Buying," 742
43. Black Gold's directors note that the 2002 Ethiopian famine spurred their interest; they included shots of Ethiopia's lush scenery to counter the dusty, flyblown image of Ethiopia established in 1980s international media coverage of famine
44. Marx, Capital, 1:114
45. Marx, Capital, 1:74
46. Bruce Robbins, "Commodity Histories," PMLA 120 (2005): 455 - 56
47. Michael Pollan, "Produce Politics," New York Times Magazine, January 14, 2001, partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20010114mag-wwln.html.
48. Pollan describes industrial food production as "a journey of forgetting," which echoes in synchronic terms what Robbins in "Commodity Histories" (460n10) describes as a collective, diachronic "forgetting" of many commodities' imbrication in the violent histories of colonial exploitation that put sugar in English (i.e., Chinese) tea, tobacco in European pipes, and African slaves on New World plantations.
49. See Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2006), 10
50. Hitchcock, Imaginary States, 119
51. Ian Cook and Philip Crang, "The World on a Plate: Culinary Culture, Displacement, and Geographical Knowledge," Journal of Material Culture 1 (1996): 132
52. Pollan, Omnivore's Dilemma, 11
53. Robbins, "Commodity Histories," 455
54. See Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
55. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, Barbara E. Johnson, John McGowan, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Jeffrey J. Williams (New York: Norton, 2001), 1498.
56. Ramamurthy, "Why Is Buying," 747
57. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, "Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming," Public Culture 12 (2000): 294.
58. Lisa Ann Richey, "Better (RED) Than Dead: Celebrities and the New Frontier of Development Assistance" (paper presented at the Africa Workshop, University of Michigan, October 16, 2007)
59. See also the Buy (Less) Crap campaign, which is visually modeled after (Product)Red; its parody urges media consumers, "Shopping is not a solution. Buy (less). Give more. [...] We invite you to donate directly to the (RED) campaign's beneficiary The Global Fund and to these other charitable causes... without consuming".
60. See www.buylesscrap.com (accessed April 2, 2011).
61. Gail M. Hollander, "Re-naturalizing Sugar: Narratives of Place, Production, and Consumption," Social and Cultural Geography 4 (2003): 61.
62. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, ed. Werner Sollors (1789; repr., New York: Norton, 2001).
63. This information appears on an eight-pack of Seventh Generation. The emphasis appears in the original.