UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- A book-launch event to celebrate "Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Colombia," written by Alex Fattal, an assistant professor in the Department of Film-Video and Media Studies at Penn State, will be held at 4 p.m. Nov. 30 at Webster’s Bookstore Café in State College.
The 304-page book, published by the University of Chicago Press, details the Colombian government's efforts to transform Marxist guerrilla fighters in the FARC into consumer citizens. Fattal shows how the market has become one of the principal grounds on which counterinsurgency warfare is waged and post-conflict futures are imagined in the country.
Fattal’s case study also examines the larger phenomenon of the convergence of marketing and militarism through a mixture of archival research and extensive field work.
The book launch will feature a reading by Fattal, as well as commentary from Alex Dent of George Washington University and music from Adianez Martinez. The event is free and open to the public.
Fattal’s writing has been published by American Ethnologist, Anthropological Quarterly, Public Books, Sensate; and featured on the websites of Cultural Anthropology, the SSRC, Foreign Policy; and been quoted or highlighted by Wired, Washington Post, CNN, Los Angeles Times, among others. He frequently blogs for Huffington Post.