Popular Culture Review Volume 29, Number 2, Summer 2018 | Page 246

Book Review
Blasian Invasion : Racial Mixing in the Celebrity Industrial Complex ( Race , Rhetoric , and Media Series ). Myra S . Washington . University Press of Mississippi , 2017 . 192 pages . ISBN : 978-1496814227
The best aspects of story telling in service of a good argument are evident in Myra Washington ’ s book , Blasian Invasion in which she offers an engaging and layered argument that is a dynamic discussion about human nature and modern culture . Although this is a sociological treatise , Blasian Invasion tackles the mythological facets of race as well as the real world results of misunderstandings that occur when we evaluate people in terms of racial stereotypes . In fact this work is timely and vital particularly in light of the fact that current American political discourse racism is now being liberally employed to validate some horrific social engineering protocols .
This is a discussion of ethnicity as a term that because of the way the terms is used has become devoid of authenticity . “ We find ourselves in a postmodern moment where culture has become flattened and emptied of meaning , only to be commodified and then sanitized ...” ( 14 ), Washington writes . She focuses on ethnicity as if it was a brand used to sell the product ( the person or the candidate ) and considers the possibility of the development of “ alternative concepts of community ,” ones that focus on the name calling , if you will , that can be used positively to redefine human connections in terms other than ancient historical or biological terms . She
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