Reviews
This book will be of great interest to anthropologists as well as scholars and students from a wide variety of fields that engage with popular culture as well as the study of ethnicity and race, and it could be successfully used in a number of advanced undergraduate courses on related topics. Overall, Shankar does a masterful job at demonstrating the nuances of media production in a multicultural society and her latest contribution to the field should be widely read., In the cultural hermeneutic tradition of great storytelling, Shalini Shankar has produced an empirically rich and theoretically sound ethnography. In it she tells a brilliant analytic story about race, Asian America, and the assumed 'post-racial' world of advertising.... Advertising Diversity is an ideal book for upper-level undergraduate and graduate classes in anthropology, Asian American studies, ethnic studies, and business., Shalini Shankar's new book Advertising Diversity ... makes an ... important contribution by improving our understanding of the subtle techniques through which difference is depoliticized and reproduced through racial and ethnic representation., Advertising Diversity combines the analytic dexterity of a talented cultural interpreter and the careful and nuanced vision of an accomplished ethnographer. Shalini Shankar has written a stunning study of the inner workings of capitalism's nervous system: corporate America. As such, she offers a virtuosic yet sobering exploration of the competing discourses, intents, aspirations, and creative impulses that go into the process of producing the advertising copy of a consumable image of multicultural USA., Advertising Diversity is a valuable addition to this area of study.... [T]he book makes a powerful case for the way in which corporate uses of apparently progressive ideas like 'diversity' and 'multiculturalism' are in fact deeply retrogressive, normalizing various types and groups of people into a convenient, colourblind and postracial monoculture., Shalini Shankar gives us a vivid, sharply observed dispatch from the place where multicultural marketing meets the pieties of a putatively postracial America. To her enormous credit--and our great illumination--she effaces neither the open-endedness of advertising practice nor the structural persistence of racist effects. Critical rather than polemical, Shankar's stance exemplifies the ethnographic ethos at its finest., The combination of Shankar's critical lens and outsider perspective commingle to produce an originative piece of work. Advertising Diversity offers even the most seasoned consumption and marketing scholars a compelling (but all too rare) look inside the world of Asian-American advertising, where culture and consumption converge to create 'model consumers.', [T]his book is a valuable and innovative contribution to the burgeoning field of media ethnography and particularly useful to those interested in conducting fieldwork in media industries. It is here, in the backrooms and boardrooms of corporate America, where Shankar's work shines as she illuminates the internal dynamics of racial naturalization and its circulation.... This is an important and innovative book for scholars interested in Asian American studies, communication, media studies, media industries, cultural studies, and visual culture., "Shankar has accomplished plenty with this work and can be justly applauded for bringing to bear the detailed processes by which Asian American--images, sounds, languages, bodies, and lives--inhabit our mediascape. Advertising Diversity vividly demonstrates the role of ad agencies in constructing a place for Asian Americans to take at the colorful table of multicultural consumerism."