Picture a familiar scene: long lines of shoppers waiting to check out at the grocery store, carts filled to the brim with the week’s food. While many might wonder what is in each cart, Andrew Warnes implores us to consider the symbolism of the cart itself. In his inventive new book, Warnes examines how the everyday shopping cart is connected to a complex web of food production and consumption that has spread from the United States throughout the world. Today, shopping carts represent choice and autonomy for consumers, a recognizable American way of life that has become a global phenomenon. This succinct and and accessible book provides an excellent overview of consumerism and the globalization of American culture.
Andrew Warnes is a Reader in American Studies at the University of Leeds. He is the author of American Tantalus: Horizons, Happiness, and the Impossible Pursuits of US Literature and Culture and Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America’s First Food, among other books.
“This book proposes to explain global consumerism by using a surprisingly modest object as its focus: the shopping cart. In How the Shopping Cart Explains Global Consumerism the seemingly simple, inanimate shopping cart takes on a networked liveliness far more vibrant and ominous than expected. Warnes’s study allows readers to see the many dimensions of these things and how they train us as consumers.”—Christopher Schaberg, author of The Work of Literature In an Age of Post-Truth
"In How the Shopping Cart Explains Global Consumerism, Andrew Warnes offers an understanding of consumerism—both in the United States and around the world—as a consequence of the invention, in the 1930s, of that humble yet ubiquitous device, the shopping cart. By focusing on the history of the shopping cart, Warnes returns us to the importance of material underpinnings even for abstract and diffuse social conditions. An outstanding book."—Steven Shaviro, author of Discognition
176 pp.5.5 x 8.25Illus: 13 bw illustrations
9780520295292$24.95|£21.00Paper
Jan 2019