{"title":"The Scouring of Wellywood","authors":"I. Williams","doi":"10.1215/17432197-9305419","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n This article uses the work of brand theorists and New Zealand–based cultural critics to examine the circumstances that created the “Hobbit Law,” a New Zealand law aimed at busting local film industry unions. Branding logics created a struggle for authenticity around the importance of Middle-earth to New Zealand's national identity in the twenty-first century. This hybrid identity was then articulated as something that stood against labor actions by film industry workers, culminating in citizen marches against local labor. It closes by exploring ways that the importance of the brand as sense-making tool under neoliberalism might be reconfigured as something that might bridge the gap between media consumer and creative industry worker.","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":"62 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Cultural Politics","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-9305419","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"Social Sciences","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article uses the work of brand theorists and New Zealand–based cultural critics to examine the circumstances that created the “Hobbit Law,” a New Zealand law aimed at busting local film industry unions. Branding logics created a struggle for authenticity around the importance of Middle-earth to New Zealand's national identity in the twenty-first century. This hybrid identity was then articulated as something that stood against labor actions by film industry workers, culminating in citizen marches against local labor. It closes by exploring ways that the importance of the brand as sense-making tool under neoliberalism might be reconfigured as something that might bridge the gap between media consumer and creative industry worker.
期刊介绍:
Cultural Politics is an international, refereed journal that explores the global character and effects of contemporary culture and politics. Cultural Politics explores precisely what is cultural about politics and what is political about culture. Publishing across the arts, humanities, and social sciences, the journal welcomes articles from different political positions, cultural approaches, and geographical locations. Cultural Politics publishes work that analyzes how cultural identities, agencies and actors, political issues and conflicts, and global media are linked, characterized, examined, and resolved. In so doing, the journal supports the innovative study of established, embryonic, marginalized, or unexplored regions of cultural politics. Cultural Politics, while embodying the interdisciplinary coverage and discursive critical spirit of contemporary cultural studies, emphasizes how cultural theories and practices intersect with and elucidate analyses of political power. The journal invites articles on representation and visual culture; modernism and postmodernism; media, film, and communications; popular and elite art forms; the politics of production and consumption; language; ethics and religion; desire and psychoanalysis; art and aesthetics; the culture industry; technologies; academics and the academy; cities, architecture, and the spatial; global capitalism; Marxism; value and ideology; the military, weaponry, and war; power, authority, and institutions; global governance and democracy; political parties and social movements; human rights; community and cosmopolitanism; transnational activism and change; the global public sphere; the body; identity and performance; heterosexual, transsexual, lesbian, and gay sexualities; race, blackness, whiteness, and ethnicity; the social inequalities of the global and the local; patriarchy, feminism, and gender studies; postcolonialism; and political activism.