Authentic(TM): The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (Critical Cultural Communication)
“This profound and powerful book is replete with perceptive insights and persuasive arguments.Authentic ™reveals how the pervasiveness of branding culture requires us to rethink our investments in authenticity and our understandings of citizenship and social membership. Banet-Weiser offers us the first fully theorized analysis of how the hegemony of branding culture and the eclipse of typographic culture by digital culture combine to make us fundamentally new kinds of social subjects.”-George Lipsitz,author ofTime Passages"We all search for spaces where we can express ourselves or find others we value, but what happens when all those spaces are already aligned by the self-interested productivity of brands? No one has followed those searches more attentively than Sarah Banet-Weiser. As inherited politics falters, Banet-Weiser's major new book is an indispensable guide to an ambivalent future."-Nick Couldry,author ofWhy Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism“In this lively and penetrating analysis of the ubiquity and consequences of non-stop branding in the 21st century, Sarah Banet-Weiser pushes us to think beyond the false distinctions between consumer culture on the one hand and ‘authenticity’ on the other, and instead to contemplate what is at stake in living in branded cultures—especially for our very core identities and values.  A stimulating, smart, and extremely timely book.”-Susan J. Douglas,University of Michigan and author ofThe Rise of Enlightened Sexism"...Authenticby Sarah Banet-Weiser, is an interesting book, because it makes it its business to find the halfway point between this so-called infantilizing commerce and the world of the authentic and real—thus that 'ambivalence.'"-Slate.com,"Each chapter stands on its own, making this a useful text to use in classroom."-Choice,