‘With Love from Band Aid’: Sentimental exchange, affective economies, and popular globalism

• Presents a new approach to understanding Band Aid and Live Aid charity mega-events.
• Argues that love and intimacy are important in some popular global imaginaries.
• Shows relevance of feminist approach to sentimentality and consumer culture.
• Argues global community was imagined through social practices of commodity exchange.
• Argues that popular culture includes both utopian and normative elements.

This paper discusses affective attachments to popular global imaginaries by examining the place of love in the popular humanitarianism associated with the 1984–85 music charity events Band Aid and Live Aid.The paper offers a materialist reading of the charity spectacles that situates them within a popular culture of sentimentality engaged in making and imagining forms of global community through social practices of exchange. It draws on the feminist scholarship on sentimental cultures and their imbrication with social reform movements and commodity capitalism to show how Band Aid can be understood as part of a popular culture of sentimental exchange, in which famine relief images, stories, tears, money and goods were passed along in affective exchanges that also involved sentimental stories and personalized commodities and capital such as wedding rings, household furniture and allowances. The circulation of feeling, concretized in the exchange of goods and money, confirmed the social fantasy of global community, imagined through the terms of intimate love and familial gift exchange. When combined with local, national and international commodity markets that allowed information, goods and images to travel among strangers, global gift giving appeared to replace geopolitical alliances and financial interests with an open, barrier-free, affective economy of love and cooperation.