Description
Book SynopsisA compilation of articles and essays concerning the Hummer as a cultural object, this book is designed to be used by a diverse audience. It spans a variety of disciplinary approaches and methodologies, including material culture, marketing and advertising, popular culture, technology, urban planning, literature and media, and political economy.
Trade ReviewA superbly conceived case-book on the most disturbingly American commodity to be rolled out in the last turbo-boosted decade. Required reading! -- Andrew Ross, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University, USA; author of Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times
This book shows that in extraordinary objects, like the Hummer, the deepest desires and anxieties of a culture can be located. The authors bring to bear multiple cultural and interpretive methodologies. Collectively, their accounts reveal the diverse discourses that make this strange transport a phenomenon that connects culture, economy, aesthetics, history, and subjectivity in a most powerful way. -- Ian Woodward, Griffith University, Australia
This is an interesting book that explores the connection between products, culture and politics. It provides an innovative view of recent Amerian culture, and is an important addition to the growing body of work on consumer products and consumption. * American Studies, April 2008 *
The guiding concern of Cardenas and Gorman's project is to understand the Hummer as a significant cultural object that is also a "moving contradiction"....The contradictions that the authors consequentially evoke and discuss in their particular social contexts are as insightful for Hummer admirers as they are alarming for Hummer-hating environmentalists. -- Marius K. Luedicke * Advertising & Society Review *
Table of ContentsChapter 1 Foreword: Getting Behind the Wheel Chapter 2 Introduction Part 3 Part I: Myth and Space Chapter 4 A Gated Community on Wheels Chapter 5 The H3: Television Advertising and the Reconfigured Homeland Chapter 6 Becoming Auto-Mobile, or Taking a Road Less Traveled Chapter 7 The "Stop and Stare" Aesthetics of the Hummer: Aesthetic Illusion as an Independent Function Chapter 7 The Hummer: The Return of the Hard Body Part 8 Part II: Myth and Body Chapter 8 Primordial Enchantment: Print Media, Promotional Culture, and the Hummer's Siren Song Chapter 11 Armored Bodies: The Hummer, The Schwarzenegger Persona, and Consumer Appeal Chapter 12 The Hummer as Cultural and Political Myth: A Multi-Sited Ethnographic Analysis Part 13 Part III: Myth and Discourse Chapter 14 The H2—The Humvee's Kinder, Other Chapter 15 (R)evolutions: Myths of the Hummer in The New York Times Chapter 16 Homeland Security: The Hummer as Apocalyptic Vehicle Chapter 17 The Hummer as Brute Image Part 18 Part IV: Myth as Vehicle Chapter 19 Resisting Hummers through Visual Rhetoric: FUH2.com as Counterpublic Chapter 20 Auto Militarization: Citizen Soldiers, the Hummer, and the War on Terror Chapter 21 The Hummer: Race, Military, and Consumption Politics Chapter 22 I Am the Humvee
