Anthropology Seminar Series - Ann Kingsolver, University of Kentucky

American Made? U.S. Economic Nationalism’s Practical Impossibility

Economic nationalist rhetoric in the U.S. seems to gain symbolic power in relation to the very impossibility of what it proposes. This lecture will examine the economic nationalist spectacle of “Made in America Week” 2017 and related isolationist assertions in the context of how deeply and inextricably global the means and organization of production, distribution, and consumption actually are throughout the U.S.A. Rural Foreign Trade Zones in the U.S. will be discussed as an example of the impossibility of “Made in America” claims, even for goods bearing that label.

Ann Kingsolver
Professor of Anthropology
University of Kentucky