Description: The Hummer: Myths and Consumer Culture is a study of the notorious automobile/sports utility vehicle. Featuring more than fifteen essays, this collection analyzes the Hummer through a wide array of disciplines, including material culture, marketing and advertising, popular cul...
Review Quotes:
"A 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 "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