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Acknowledgments
- Rutgers University Press
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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S ix Acknowledgments This book owes its existence to my two children, Suhaila and Nilim, who have shared with me endless hours of watching children’s films and television, reading “Made in” labels in stores, and, most of all, helped bring home in a visceral sense the vulnerability of all children. In the first few quiet moments that follow their falling asleep, I, like other parents, have felt that poignant sense of gratitude from knowing that our children are secure, for we all know that we can never take for granted the security we provide our children. How can we, when we know that there is no safety net for children if the adults who by mere accident of birth are responsible for them become incapable of taking care of them? When we know that an abandoned child has little value on the streets of our world, while the young lives in our homes are infinitely invaluable? It is to that agonizingly tender awareness—one that I share with my own parents, other parents, and all adults who have loved a child—that I dedicate this book. Writing Coining for Capital has not been easy, because the pessimism I feel about the future hangs in a fine balance with the optimism that is necessary to and also a gift from loving children. Here I was helped enormously by my dissertation committee, Professors Chuck Kleinhans, Manjunath Pendakur, and Tom Gunning, who were unwavering in pointing out the contradictions in both my analysis and what I analyzed. All three will find their insights, knowledge, and experiences cooked together in these pages. It is to them that I owe the mix x A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S of critical theory, political economy, and the connections between cinema , modernity, and consumer culture that has informed my understanding of children’s consumer culture. Chuck’s sharp humor and distrust of all sorts of “authorities,” backed by an unwavering commitment to theory that would transform the structural exploitation of class, gender, race, and sexuality, was an anchor among the changing fads of postmodern, poststructuralist thinking. He has lived the longest with this work, helping articulate answers when even the questions were only half-formed. I was to turn to Manju Pendakur for lessons in political economy and the systemic nature of capitalist expansion . Luckily for me, Manju is now at Southern Illinois University , where I teach, and I need walk just a few yards to ask questions, not just about the political economy of the media industry but about life itself as it is these days. I will always be grateful to Tom for insisting that I need “to go back and look at texts” rather than read them solely to prove a theory. That lesson, along with Tom’s work in early cinema and consumer culture, has served me well. The seeds of this work, the Marxist-feminist theory that forms its core, go back to my days at Delhi University in the 1980s and my teachers there, particularly Randhir Singh, Sumit Sarkar, and Tanika Sarkar. The conviction that in imagining an alternative world we should put children first was made palpably clear for me by Barry John, a children’s drama teacher with whom I worked in Delhi. Of the people who have spoken with me and helped clarify my thinking, I would like to thank Amy Beer, Judy Hoffman, Julia LesageHyun suk Seo, Jeffrey Skoller, and Usha Zaccharias, who remained only an email or phone call away. At Southern Illinois University, I would like to thank my students, who will recognize in the following pages our class discussions, which helped me to better articulate the ideas expressed here. I would especially like to thank Shannon Petrello for the cover image, Hwa-young Youn for research assistance, and Sudesh Balan for collecting the film frames. My colleagues Lilly Boruszkowski, Mike Covell and Jan Roddy mentored me in teaching and in combining the obligations of academic work with one’s own writing. Both sent my way news clippings and other bits of information that would help this project along. Best of all, they were also there to play and celebrate, and not always for a reason. Thanks are also due to Kevin Koron for all his help with the technical details of this work, to the Department of Cinema and Photography...