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We may be living in a “postcolonial world,” but the vestiges of colonialism live on—often mediated by markets and reproduced through marketing practices. In this special session, we trace the trajectories of past marketing practices and cultural forces into the present to understand opportunities and obstacles for consumer empowerment through marketplace decolonization. Decolonization represents decoupling from the structures and practices of colonialism (Mignolo 2007).

This session addresses two questions: 1) How do marketing practices reinforce institutionalized representations of colonized people as exotic and disempowered others? 2) How can shifts in macro-market understandings of colonized people impact how they are represented and their opportunities in the marketplace? This session explores colonized people as consumers and producers, as targets of cultural appropriation, and as powerful culture-makers. These four presentations converge on the social construction of colonized people through marketplace practices and structures—seeking to understand opportunities for agency and identify alternative trajectories. These presentations focus on how cultural moments can provide opportunities that empower colonized consumers (eg, Roma people) and producers (eg, Australian Aboriginal artists) with the agency to resist and decouple from post-colonized markets. The first two presentations investigate how colonial institutions are reproduced through advertising and continue to haunt cultural branding practices. First, Veresiu shows how the framing of colonized subjects as “exotic others” continues in contemporary marketing …