Retro brands are relaunched historical brands with updated features. The authors conduct a "netnographic" analysis of two prominent retro brands, the Volkswagen New Beetle and Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace, that reveals the importance of Allegory (brand story), Aura (brand essence), Arcadia (idealized community), and Antinomy (brand paradox). Retro brand meanings are predicated on a Utopian communal element and an enlivening paradoxical essence. Retro brand management involves an uneasy, cocreative, and occasionally clamorous alliance between producers and consumers.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2016363_code1787394.pdf?abstractid=2016363&mirid=1

Teaching Old Brands New Tricks: Retro Branding and the Revival of Brand Meaning

SHORTLY AFTER WORLD WAR II, A FRENCH REPORTER ASKED EXPATRIate Richard Wright his opinion about the "Negro problem" in the United States. The author replied "There isn't any Negro problem; there is only a white problem."' By inverting the reporter's question, Wright called attention to its hidden assumptions-that racial polarization comes from the existence of blacks rather than from the behavior of whites, that black people are a "problem" for whites rather than fellow citizens entitled to justice, and that unless otherwise specified, "Americans" means whites.2 But Wright's formulation also placed political mobilization by African Americans in context, attributing it to the systemic practices of aversion, exploitation, denigration, and discrimination practiced by people who think of themselves as "white." Whiteness is everywhere in American culture, but it is very hard to see. As Richard Dyer argues, "white power secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular."3 As the unmarked category against which difference is constructed, whiteness never has to speak its name, never has to acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations.4 To identify, analyze, and oppose the destructive consequences of whiteness, we need what Walter Benjamin called "presence of mind." Benjamin wrote that people visit fortune-tellers not so much out of a desire to know the future but rather out of a fear of not noticing some

http://courses.washington.edu/com597j/student%20presentations/Lipsitz.pdf

The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the "White" Problem in American Studies

How, why, and under what conditions are NGOs able to influence state's interests? To answer these questions, I examine the process through which women's organizations succeeded in placing front and center on the UN agenda two issues that had been perceived as exclusively private: violence against women and reproductive rights and health. I develop a theoretical framework drawing on both the agenda-setting and social movement literature. I suggest that NGOs attempt to influence states' interests by framing problems, solutions, and justifications for political action. Whether they are successful in mobilizing support is contingent on the dynamic interaction of primarily two factors: (1) the political opportunity structure in which NGOs are embedded, comprising access to institutions, the presence of influential allies, and changes in political alignments and conflicts; and (2) the mobilizing structures that NGOs have at their disposal, including organizational entrepreneurs, a heterogeneous international constituency, and experts. I find that in the beginning of the agenda-setting process, the influence of NGOs is rather limited, their frames are highly contested, and structural obstacles outweigh organizational resources. However, over time the influence of NGOs increases. As they establish their own mobilizing structures, they become capable of altering the political opportunity structure in their favor, and their frames gain in acceptance and legitimacy.

Framing Issues and Seizing Opportunities: The UN, NGOs, and Women's Rights

From 1965 to 1975 the legendary Silicon Valley company Fairchild Semiconductor operated a state-of-the-art integrated circuit manufacturing plant in Shiprock, New Mexico on Navajo land. In the face of concerns about high-tech pollution, increasingly empowered labor organizations, and a newly politicized and visible American Indian civil rights movement, indigenous electronic workers at Shiprock were pressed into service as examples of the peaceful coexistence and integration of the past and the future, the primitive and the modern, creativity and capitalism. Navajo women workers were described as ideal predigital digital workers, uniquely suited to the job by temperament, culture, and gender. Their labor as platform builders was cited as evidence that digital work—the work of the hand and its digits—could be painlessly transferred from the indigenous cultural context into the world of technological commercial innovation, benefiting both in the process.

Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture

This article seeks to define common ground from which to build a more integrated approach to the persistence of indigenous societies in North America. Three concepts are discussed—identity, practice, and context—that may prove useful for the development of archaeologies of persistence by allowing us to counter terminal narratives and essentialist concepts of cultural identity that are deeply ingrained in scholarly and popular thinking about Native American societies. The use of these concepts is illustrated in an example that shows how current archaeological research is challenging long-held scholarty and popular beliefs about the effects of colonialism in coastal California, where the policies of Spanish colonial missionaries have long been thought to have driven local native peoples to cultural extinction. By exploring how the sometimes dramatic changes of the colonial period were internally structured and are just one part of long and dynamic native histories, archaeologies of persistence may help to bring about a shift in how the archaeology of colonialism presents the histories of native peoples in North America—one that can make archaeology more relevant to descendant communities.

Archaeologies of Persistence: Reconsidering the Legacies of Colonialism in Native North America

(2005). Indians in Unexpected Places. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 61-61.

Indians in Unexpected Places

Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America

Working the Navajo Way: Labor and Culture in the Twentieth Century: O'Neill, Colleen: Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 235 pp., Publication Date: October 2005

(1995). Once They Moved Like the Wind: Cochise, Geronimo, and the Apache Wars. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 116-116.

Once They Moved Like the Wind: Cochise, Geronimo, and the Apache Wars

i ty in the process. Using the literature that instructors and students generated at the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians in the late nineteenth century and writings that white bohemians in Taos and Santa Fe produced in the early twentieth century, Pfister traces changes in reformers’ theories of “Indianness” and their relationship to shifting visions of individuality in the United States. Richard Henry Pratt, the director of the Carlisle School, wanted to create “usable Indians.” Beneath the teachers’ dehumanizing treatment of Native American students was Pratt’s theory that wild, tribal Indians needed to become individual, productive, and uncomplaining laborers in the nineteenth-century American industrial economy. Students such iis Charles Eastman digested Pratt’s program i n ii variety of ways, and their autobiographical writings reflected the ambiguity of their roles a s novices in the American industrial culture and members of traditional American Indian societies. In the early twentieth century, some literati conceived of Indianness and individuality differently than Pratt had, although Pfister never shows that his primary sources-D. H. Lawrence, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and John Collier-contested Prati’s writings specifically. Each criticized the psychological elfects of corporate consumerism on Americans and used American Indians as a tonic for capitalism’s ills. Collier, in particular, challenged attempts to assimilate Indians into American capitalism by insisting that individual native tribes were distinct and should maintain their cultural “authenticity.” His views led to the New Deal’s reassertion of

The World's Richest Indian: The Scandal over Jackson Barnett's Oil Fortune: Thome, Tanis C.: New York: Oxford University Press 290 pp., Publication Date: October 2003

David A. Walker

Papers

Indians in Unexpected Places

Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America

Working the Navajo Way: Labor and Culture in the Twentieth Century: O'Neill, Colleen: Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 235 pp., Publication Date: October 2005

Once They Moved Like the Wind: Cochise, Geronimo, and the Apache Wars

The World's Richest Indian: The Scandal over Jackson Barnett's Oil Fortune: Thome, Tanis C.: New York: Oxford University Press 290 pp., Publication Date: October 2003