Roopali Mukherjee

I am a critical race scholar of media. My work examines how discourses of race and racialization shape and are shaped by media cultures and the dynamics of social power. Drawing on theories and methodological approaches from British cultural studies, critical race theory, and critical race feminisms, I am interested in understanding how seemingly race-neutral concepts like “merit” and “truth” narrate profoundly raced and gendered histories. I seek to analyze the power of race and racialization as cultural epistemes, formidable in their power to shape memory, nostalgia, myth, and fantasy, and cohering “truths” about battleground issues like affirmative action, commodity activism, and post-racialism. My current work parses racial histories of the branded self, examining the brand as a raced theater for the production and commodification of subjectivity, clearing ground for racialized and racializing modes of branded labor within late-stage capitalism, and routinizing the violent grammar of the brand within assemblages of contemporary biopolitical triage. I am the author of two books, The Blacking Factory: Brand Culture and the Technologies of the Racial Self (University of Minnesota Press, in press) and The Racial Order of Things: Cultural Imaginaries of the Post-Soul Era (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), and the co-editor of two scholarly anthologies, Racism Postrace (Duke University Press, 2019) and Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times (NYU Press, 2012). I teach graduate and undergraduate courses about Blackness in public culture, African Americans in US film and media, and the linkages between racial capitalism and media cultures.