Consumers and Citizens

Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts

2001
•
Author:

Nestor Garcia Canclini
Translated by George Yúdice
Introduction by George Yúdice

An essential analysis of the ways consumerism and globalization intersect with political power.

The best-known and most innovative cultural studies scholar in Latin America maps the critical effects of urban sprawl and global media and commodity markets on citizens-and shows at the same time that the complex results mean not only a shrinkage of certain traditional rights (particularly those of the welfare or client state) but also new openings for expanding citizenship.

Consumers and Citizens sums up why Garcia Canclini is one of the leading intellectuals in the field of culture today. He blends innovative theorizing with highly practical applications: survey research and ethnography rub up against postmodern and postcolonial concerns.

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International Journal of Communication

Social Theory/Latin American Studies

An essential analysis of the ways consumerism and globalization intersect with political power.

In Consumers and Citizens, Néstor García Canclini, the best-known and most innovative cultural studies scholar in Latin America, maps the critical effects of urban sprawl and global media and commodity markets on citizens-and shows at the same time that the complex results mean not only a shrinkage of certain traditional rights (particularly those of the welfare or client state) but also new openings for expanding citizenship.

García Canclini focuses on the diverse ways in which democratic societies recognize markets of citizen opinions, however heterogeneous and dissonant, as in the fashion and entertainment industries. He shows how identity issues, brought to the fore by the aligning of citizenship and consumption, can no longer be understood strictly within the purview of territory or nation. Rather, the postmodern citizen-consumer inhabits a transterritorial and multilingual space, structured more along the lines of markets than states. Defining this space, García Canclini seeks to formulate a participatory and critical approach to consumption in which national culture, far from being extinguished, is reconstituted in transnational, cultural interactions.

ISBN 0-8166-2986-2 Cloth £34.50 $49.95xx
ISBN 0-8166-2987-0 Paper £14.00 $19.95x
256 Pages 5 7/8 x 9 April
Cultural Studies of the Americas Series, volume 6
Translation Inquiries: University of Minnesota Press


Néstor García Canclini is the author of Hybrid Cultures (Minnesota, 1995), which won the 1992 Premio Iberoamericano for its original Spanish edition. He is director of the Program of Studies on Urban Culture at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City.

George Yúdice teaches in the American Studies Program and in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University.

Consumers and Citizens sums up why Garcia Canclini is one of the leading intellectuals in the field of culture today. He blends innovative theorizing with highly practical applications: survey research and ethnography rub up against postmodern and postcolonial concerns.

—

International Journal of Communication

Contents

Translator's Introduction
From Hybridity to Policy
For a Purposeful Cultural Studies
Author's Preface to the English-Language Edition
The North-South Dialogue on Cultural Studies

Introduction Twenty-first-Century Consumers, Eighteenth-Century Citizens

Part I Cities in Globalization

1. Consumption Is Good for Thinking
2. Mexico Cultural Globalization in a Disintegrating City
3. Urban Cultural Policies in Latin America
4. Narrating the Multicultural

Part II Postnational Suburbias

5. Identities as a Multimedia Spectacle
6. Latin America and Europe as Suburbs of Hollywood
7. From the Public to the Private The "Americanization" of Spectators
8. Multicultural Policies and Integration via the Market

Part III Negotiation, Integration, and Getting Unplugged

9. Negotiation of Identity in Popular Classes?
10. How Civil Society Speaks Today

Notes
Index