This talk examines key emulative economies of branding, commodification, and acquisitive desire as powerful regimes of racial governance within contemporary material cultures. Within a wider neoliberal context marked by everyday encroachments of “the market,” indeed, as the neoliberal self is inexorably configured as brand and personhood as enterprise, this project tracks the operations of a “blacking factory” where formations of blackness and its intersectional orders of difference are produced, performed, marketed, and consumed. Taking a single brand icon, the Cadillac, as its case, the talk parses the industrial relations of manufacture that produce blackness as “bio-brand” within enduringly raced and gendered circuits of market value and vastly profitable economies of status and stigma. Highlighting densely mediated social practices of articulation, performance, assessment, and authentication, where the technologies of the racial self, always on the move, entangle and embed the formidable biopolitical discipline of material cultures, my point is to consider the lubricating allure of blackness as well as its stigmatizing force as exemplary sites of biopolitical manufacture, shaping, and themselves shaped by, the racial orders of acquisitive desire and advancement as well as brutal adjudications of suffering and vulnerability, each geared to the general wellbeing of the population.

Roopali Mukherjee is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the City University of New York/Queens College. She writes on issues of race within contemporary public culture in the US. She is the author of The Racial Order of Things: Cultural Imaginaries of the Post-Soul Era (UMinn 2006) and co-editor of Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times (NYU 2012). Her forthcoming works include the book, The Blacking Factory: Material Culture and the Technologies of the Racial Self, and the co-edited anthology, Race Post-Race: Culture, Critique and the Color Line (Duke UP).