Chin Elizabeth Chin

My Life with Things (eBook, PDF)

The Consumer Diaries

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

Unconventional and provocative, My Life with Things is Elizabeth Chin's meditation on her relationship with consumer goods and a critical statement on the politics and method of anthropology. Chin centers the book on diary entries that focus on everyday items-kitchen cabinet knobs, shoes, a piano-and uses them to intimately examine the ways consumption resonates with personal and social meaning: from writing love haikus about her favorite nail polish and discussing the racial implications of her tooth cap, to revealing how she used shopping to cope with a miscarriage and contemplating how her young daughter came to think that she needed Lunesta. Throughout, Chin keeps Karl Marx and his family's relationship to their possessions in mind, drawing parallels between Marx's napkins, the production of late nineteenth-century table linens, and Chin's own vintage linen collection. Unflinchingly and refreshingly honest, Chin unlocks the complexities of her attachments to, reliance on, and complicated relationships with her things. In so doing, she prompts readers to reconsider their own consumption, as well as their assumptions about the possibilities for creative scholarship.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Seitenzahl: 248
• Erscheinungstermin: 19. Mai 2016
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780822374268
• Artikelnr.: 54788301

Autorenporträt

Elizabeth Chin is Professor of Media Design Practices at Art Center College of Design and the author of Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture.

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgments  vii
1. Introduction  3
2. The Entries  37
My Life with Things  37
Learn to Love Stuff  38
Banky  40
A Digression on the Topic of the Transitional Object  42
Cebebrate!  56
My Purple Shoes  58
Newspapers  61
Rose Nails  63
The Window Shade  67
Napkins  69
My White Man's Tooth  72
Should I Be Straighter  76
Cyberfucked  79
Knobs  80
Glasses  82
Curing Rug Lust  85
Window Shopping Online  89
Catalogs  92
Other People's Labor  95
Making Roots/Making Routes  98
My Closet(s)  101
Joining the MRE  108
Fun Shopping  114
Preschool Birthday Parties  114
Xena Warrior Consumer Princess  118
I Love Your Nail Polish  120
Little Benches  123
The Kiss  126
Are There Malls in Haiti?  127
Baby Number Two Turned Me into Economic Man  129
Pictures of the Rice Grain  132
Panting in Ikea  136
Capitalism Makes Me Sick  139
My Grandmother's Rings  147
Anorectic Energy  157
Mi-Mi's Piano  162
Dream-Filled Prescriptions  169
The Turquoise Arrowhead  170
Turning The Tables  173
Minnie Mouse Earring Holder  176
Make Yourself a Beloved Person  181
3. Writing as Practice and Process  187
4. This Never Happened  203
Notes  221
Bibliography  227
Index  235