International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2007

Using sport as a lens to illuminate a path for broader cultural analysis, this essay argues for a three-pronged theoretical approach to the critique of commodity value in contemporary narratives. Three elements of an analytic strategy for the critique of commodity aesthetics are considered. First, the concept of communicative dirt posed by Leach (1976) and Hartley (1984) is considered in the service of creating commodity value from the cultural logic of sport. Second, the merits of a reader-oriented approach as used in literary criticism, reliant on understandings of Fish's (1976) notion of interpretive community and the variant ways that texts work to control reading, are considered as complementary to understanding the workings of communicative dirt. Third, the value of ethical criticism in providing an overarching frame for deconstructing the manufacture of commodity value, including strategies for using communicative dirt to construct readers and control the reading act, is assessed. A case study of a television commercial banned from the 2005 Super Bowl broadcast illustrates the tripartite approach. In conclusion, the study argues for the applicability of this dirty theory of narrative ethics to postmodern concerns with media in increasingly commodified contemporary culture.

Chutney, an Indian side dish made with zest, brings flavour to bland Indian dishes such as rice and dhal, while tickling delight to the senses. The term, used as a metaphor in Chutney Generations, the world's first exhibition tracing the complex Fiji Indian identity in a visible expression, staged at the Liverpool Museum in Sydney, Australia, is applicable to Fiji Indian migrants across the globe that savours the product and lives the word. In the processes of migration and globalisation identities fuse, cultures, dreams, ideals, ideologies, histories and the present merge and crush, in a way similar to the process of making chutney, where ingredients are blended to the point where there is no single identity; thus a new generation of humankind is created. This paper presents chutney as a paste of civilisation and a new concept to identity creation where strongly felt inclinations to retain cultures, histories and identities are neutralized in the fusion of ideas, ideals and dreams. It also engages in the chutnification of the Australian-Fiji-Indian community across three physical spaces India, Fiji and Australia, recording their past, present and aspirations of their future, through their lifestyles and treasured collections. Migration and globalisation have opened new possibilities for chutney, beyond the familiar ingredients and tastes. The community is complex and contradictory, being Indian, Fijian, Australian and global citizens, all at the same time.

This article attempts to nuance the argument of consumer sovereignty put forward by both liberal thinkers and cultural studies. Although recognising the importance (hence existence) of consumer sovereignty, the article goes against the stream of cultural audience studies and liberal accounts that have studied the benefits, pleasure and empowerment associated with watching TV. Instead it focuses on the other side of TV experience, the losses, displeasures and disempowerment of TV viewers. Through a deconstruction of audience agency, the public's power, freedom of choice and consumption as pleasure four notions on which the myth of consumer sovereignty is based this article wishes to challenge the myth of TV consumer sovereignty from both a theoretical and empirical standpoint.

Cultural Chaos: Journalism, News and Power in a Globalised World, Brian McNair (2006) London: Routledge, 248 pp., ISBN: 0415339138 (pbk), 16.99

Global Citizens: Social Movements and the Challenge of Globalization, Marjorie Mayo (2006) Canadian Scholars' Press Inc.: Toronto and Zed Books: London, 256 pp., ISBN 1842771396 (pbk), 27.50/17.99

Representing Race: Racisms, Ethnicities and Media, John Downing and Charles Husband (2005) London: Sage, 214 pp., ISBN 0-7619-6912-8 (pbk), 18.99

Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis, Roger Silverstone (2007) Cambridge: Polity Press, 256 pp., ISBN 0745635040 (pbk), 16.99