Marketing Faculty Publications and Presentations

Race, Representation, Misrepresentation, Caricatured Consumption Tropes; and Serious Matters of Inequity and Precarity

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2021

Abstract

We do not know if it is a trend or a temporally short uptick. At MGDR, we are noticing that there is some increase in significantly influential entertainment products – films, television programs, video series on streaming platforms, etc. – that strive to represent people, cultures and regions that have been marginal or underrepresented. Of course, from a ‘markets’ perspective, it makes sense – in rapidly diversifying societies such as United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Australia – to create entertainment products that supplement the large corpus of ‘mainstream’ entertainment products. In other words, the mainstream needs to start accommodating – and, we hope, merging and blending with – parallel sub-streams. Indeed, in all aspects of life, especially in the United States – and, from there, echoing worldwide – there is increasing evidence of multiracial and multiethnic representation in foodways, fashion, films and more. Given all this, we at MGDR have decided to strive to feature and analyze, in multiple issues of the journal, the emerging patterns of new or novel representations. In this issue, we focus on some films. First, the focus in on a film that, while partly cinematic fiction, also has very substantial elements of documentary-style realism. The second set of films – the original and its sequel, after a 30-year gap – deal with the relationship with the African-American culture of New York, and a mythical well-off nation in Africa.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Publication Title

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

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