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58 ‘Soft-soaping Empire: Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertising’

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... Disciplinary colonialism is most relevant to health discourses because rather than the megalithic directive language associated with sovereign colonialism that first imagined the savage and then juridically subjugated them, disciplinary colonialism came later, was also subjugatory, but through the institutionalised discipline of Indigenous bodies (Hokowhitu, 2016). For instance, limited curricula in Native Schools, nuclear family structures, soap packaging (McClintock, 2002), nutritional advice, unemployment subsidies, institutionalised pre-natal and natal care, war, statistics on childhood obesity, lifestyle magazines, educational curricula, mental health, daily and weekly schedules, prisons, workplaces, sport, and baby-boomer discourses (Hokowhitu, 2014); all of these seemingly discontinuous heterogeneous enunciations (Young, 2001) productively disciplined the Indigenous body. ...
... The enunciations of healthism that now pathologise the general population have a genealogy in discourses of class, race and colonialism underpinned by the relationship between morality and cleanliness (Hokowhitu, 2014). For instance, McClintock (2002), in her chapter Soft-soaping Empire, outlines the biopolitical relations between soap, cleanliness, morality and empire: ...
Article
The majority of Indigenous health models do not directly acknowledge that health is a contested political space. Providing a Foucauldian analysis, this article suggests a function of biopower is to naturalise discourses such as the poor Māori health statistic to appear based on factual evidence and thus are apolitical. Employing Foucault’s triad of power—sovereign, disciplinary and biopower—to understand the genealogy of Māori health, this article proffers mana motuhake (Māori political self-governance) as an appropriate health analytic because it, first, identifies Indigenous health as political and, second, because it recognises the disempowering role that colonialism has played in relation to Māori biopolitical self-governance. Hence, we suggest Māori health will be enhanced by mana motuhake and that research underpinned by Indigenous agency and self-governance resists biopower. The article references two Ageing Well National Science Challenge–funded research projects because they innovatively fundamentalise mana motuhake and politics to Indigenous health.
... Examining a specific commodity is one way to interrogate the development of racially charged critical discourses from a historical perspective. Charting the Gaytá n increasing popularity of soap in Victorian Britain, Anne McClintock (1998) analyzes how commodity fetish operated in relation to emergent middle-class values, the cult of domesticity, and imperialism. New structural systems and sites of cultural representation in the nineteenth century stoked consumerism and fueled the idea that commodities could embody symbolic value. ...
... For Anglo audiences, tequila was sometimes described as an alluring curiosity and sometimes identified as indicative of Mexican backwardness. Here, we can see how tequila, much like soap in Victorian times, was situated at the crossroads between scientific racism and commodity racism (McClintock 1998). ...
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In this article, I trace the introduction and evolution of tequila in the American marketplace as a means of exploring how race and ethnicity, commodities, and consumption operate in the organization of everyday life. Analyzing the content of English and Spanish documents from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, I argue that divergent meanings were ascribed to tequila in ways that both solidified notions of racial difference and allowed for the positive affirmation of identity. Anglos focused on its medicinal and, later, toxic properties, while ethnic Mexicans steadily incorporated it into their ritual practices and affirmatively expressed their identity through its consumption. Despite, or perhaps because of, tequila’s freighted meaning as an emblem of Mexican deviance in Anglo society, ethnic Mexicans valued and used tequila as a culturally significant symbol of mexicanidad. By focusing on tequila’s commercial history, I illustrate how ethnic Mexicans nourished traditions, both long-standing and newly formulated. Tequila, and the codes of its consumption, provided a platform for resistance and the creative expression of solidarity.
... Particular ways of inhabiting domesticity are also coupled with the process of the feminisation of male domestic workers. Anne McClintock (2002) speaks about advertisements which depict specific relationships between male domestic workers and colonial White men. She talks about representations depicting spaces exterior to the house, such as jungles, where a male domestic servant is shown serving tea and biscuits. ...
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This chapter argues that football is central to specific regional, hegemonic masculinities within colonial histories and continuities in South India. Through ethnographic narratives of a prominent football figure associated with the Malabar Special Police, this chapter shows how different performances of a particular mode of masculinity draw power from multiple sites such as regional class networks, colonial legacies, and postcolonial sport. This work demonstrates how a (post) colonial space shores up the powers associated with a male sporting figure. The regional format of a sport is as important as the global format in producing regional, hegemonic masculinity. Analysing the powers and aura associated with this sporting figure helps one to understand the specific meanings of desire and aspirations for status and stability among a section of men in a South Indian context.
... Raced market refers to race's intrinsic role in contemporary markets (Tilley and Shilliam, 2017). Commodity racism assumes racism reinforces the structural inequalities inherent to consumption (Hund et al., 2013;McClintock, 2020). Race is neither a rare intrusion nor epiphenomenal (Tilley and Shilliam, 2017). ...
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Purpose This special issue explores how marketing thought and practice have contributed to systemic racism but could alleviate racially insensitive and biased practices. An introductory historical overview briefly discusses coloniality, capitalism, eugenics, modernism, transhumanism, neo-liberalism, and liquid racism. Then, the special issue articles on colonial-based commodity racism, racial beauty imagery, implicit racial bias, linguistic racism and racial imagery in ads are introduced. Design/methodology/approach The historical introduction is grounded in a review of relevant literature. Findings Anti-racism efforts must tackle the intersection between neo-liberalism and racial injustice, the “raceless state” myth should be re-addressed, and cultural pedagogy’s role in normalizing racism should be investigated. Practical implications To stop perpetuating raced markets, educators should mainstream anti-racism and marketing. Commodity racism provides a historical and contemporary window into university-taught marketing skills. Social implications Anti-racism efforts must recognize neo-liberalism’s pervasive role in normalizing raced markets and reject conventional wisdom about a raceless cultural pedagogy, especially with the emergence of platform economies. Originality/value Little previous research has tackled the history of commodity racism, white privilege, white ideology, and instituting teaching practices sensitive to minority group experiences.
... In particular, Anne McClintock has used soap as a case study into how 'Victorian advertising took explicit shape around the reinvention of racial difference'. 73 Historians of medicine have in turn demonstrated how public health educators appropriated and adapted the new advertising techniques and technologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to get their messages across to a broader audience. Discussing the anti-TB crusade in early twentieth-century America, Tomes discusses how public health educators 'discovered' 'a veritable gold mine of persuasive techniques' from the advertising industry: from jingles and cartoon posters, to peripatetic exhibitions. ...
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There are multiple vantage points from which historians have observed the ways in which both diseased and healthy bodies (as well as their constituent parts) have served as tools of knowledge generation, instruction and coercion in the hands of medical practitioners. From spaces of formal, specialist education such as the medical school to more informal environments and modes of learning, there is a seemingly never-ending array of environments, actors and materials to consider when trying to construct a representative survey of the two fields. Focusing primarily on the British case, this article takes a selective view of the different kinds of environments, actors and approaches historians have used to understand pedagogies of health and medicine in the modern period before suggesting new avenues of potential inquiry.
... The phenomenon that are described as brands are diverse. According to McClintock (1994), in the second half of the nineteenth century, a climate was created within aggressive competition between producers are becoming more intense, due to the stretching of markets over national and international space as well as economic competition between nations. In the early stages of development, brands were intended to allow the producer to speak 'directly' to the consumer through presentation, packaging and other media, a capacity that became increasingly important as markets grew rapidly. ...
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Social media is a platform of reflection our society to depicts various views and opinions on how society should live. Social media, either it is printed, electronic or the web helps community stay connected one way or another. So, to say even teaching how one should choose a brand. Brand in this article refers to a brand is a permanent mark that is hot­â€stamped onto a good or service. This article will look into how social media is making an impact of the brand chosen by consumer. This contextual discussion will focus on how social media is seen a platform that could stimulate the thoughts of consumer in choosing and buying certain brand in a sociological view. In discussing the impact of social media and brand, various factors brands familiarity, perception, quality and value will be covered.
... 46 Indeed, the anxiety about burnt cork's permanence was potent enough to serve as a trope in an advertisement campaign for Ivory Soap running in the New York Clipper in the 1890s (Fig. 3). 47 This series of illustrations depicted minstrel actors in the middle of their postperformance ablutions. The graphic line drawings, relying upon the contrast of ink and blank page to represent the contrast of blacked-up skin with that treated by Ivory Soap, threatened readers with the possibility of minstrel black's durability, even as it promised its solubility in soap and water. ...
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On the Fourth of July, 1860, the New York Times introduced readers to a new persona treading the minstrel boards: Matinées are the order of the day, two at both the Bowerys, at George Christy's, at Bryant's, and at the Palace Gardens. Here “versatile performers” and “talented danseuses” will diversify the hours of patriotic emotion with comic pantomime and grand “Japanese ballets,” led by “Little Tommy.” Japan has dropped a little into the sere and yellow leaf, perhaps, for the natives, but for the “strangers from the provinces” the land of blacking may still have charms, and we desire that “all such” may understand that the Japan of their dreams will be on exhibition to-night at Miss Laura Keene's Theatre.
... He joyfully looks at himself At the top of the advertisement a caption says: "For improving and preserving the complexion". This advertisement has been analyzed thoroughly both by Anne McClintock (2000) and Anandi Ramamurthy (2003). Since making your skin white was synonymous with being civilized, both McClintock and Ramamurthy argue that making the black boy white functions as the representation of the British "civilizing mission" (Ramamurthy 2003, 26, McClintock 2000, in which soap is featured as a product which whitens, i.e. civilizes, the racial Other (McClintock 2000, 134). ...
... He joyfully looks at himself At the top of the advertisement a caption says: "For improving and preserving the complexion". This advertisement has been analyzed thoroughly both by Anne McClintock (2000) and Anandi Ramamurthy (2003). Since making your skin white was synonymous with being civilized, both McClintock and Ramamurthy argue that making the black boy white functions as the representation of the British "civilizing mission" (Ramamurthy 2003, 26, McClintock 2000, in which soap is featured as a product which whitens, i.e. civilizes, the racial Other (McClintock 2000, 134). ...
... This was not a simple valorisation of white bias or ideals of beauty, but rather the consequences of negotiating cultural hegemony and regimes of power that objectified race in the realm of the domestic. As Anne McClintock points out, the domestic was a colonial construction to maintain hegemony over the division of labour at home and the subordinate "Other" abroad (McClintock 1994). In the representation of the domestic and popular culture, the black subject has either been erased or stereotyped as objects of servitude, caricature, fear and desire. ...
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This article aims to explore, how the struggle over the sacred and the secular is enacted within the material culture of the front room as an index of the double consciousness that takes place in the black every day. The scared is often reduced to the purely religious, but unshackling it, and engaging with the sacred as a spectrum of spiritual experience that illuminates its dialogic relationship with the political, and therefore the secular. Reclaiming the sacred provides a critical praxis towards decolonising the legacy of coloniality in the context of postcolonial modernity. As a cultural institution of self-making, valorising the material culture of the front room as a space of black interiority resists the racist trope that we live on the street, and have no homes to go to, with families and values. This interiority has shaped, and been shaped by the cultural politics of postwar Caribbean migration, and reveals the rich complexity of “black domestic life” that the “generality of society” rarely understands. Connecting the spiritual with the political provides a psychic recuperation towards resisting and healing from trauma as a process in an ongoing structuring of colonial power, cultural imperialism, and racial violence. This article will draw on research in curating my installation-based exhibitions, The West Indian Front Room (2005-06) and Rockers , Soulheads and Lovers: Sound Systems Back in da Day (2015-16).
... Yet Ylva Habel (2005: 125) still documents a 'longstanding fascination with the exotic' in Swedish national culture, using Fanon's understanding of the 'hypervisibility' of blackness to set Swedish reception of Josephine Baker's tours in the same structure of feeling and power as public fascination with 'blackamoor' pages brought to Sweden by eighteenth-century transatlantic trading companies. Kristín Loftsdóttir, studying fin-de-siècle Icelandic textbooks and adventure narratives, argues meanwhile that Icelanders identified their nation with Europeanness, civilisational mastery, masculinity and whiteness, and enacted 'counter-identification' with Africa, through comparable racialised/gendered frameworks to those described by historians such as Ann Laura Stoler (1995Stoler ( , 2002 and Anne McClintock (1994McClintock ( , 1995 for western European imperial nations (Loftsdóttir 2009: 271). While Sweden had an empire and Icelanders could have viewed themselves as imperial subjects not colonisers, notions of whiteness and European civilisational advantage, constructed versus ' Africa' , defined both nations. ...
... The limitations of using skin as a semiotic system with which to communicate active addiction is illuminated when comparing the white female addict in State of Play and the black female addict in Moonlight. Whereas the white female addict's whiteness must be almost completely obscured by dirt, in racist ideologies the black body has historically been associated with dirt (for more on this see McClintock, 1995). The dirt used to signify addiction on a white female body racializes that body as non-white or less-than-white; the black female addict is therefore doubly tainted by problematic discourses that link both blackness and addiction with dirt. ...
Article
What does considering skin carefully and specifically illuminate about addiction, addiction discourse and/or the visual culture of addiction, that more general considerations of the body do not? What light is shed when we talk about skin and addiction? I want to propose in this brief article that in looking at addiction and addiction discourse through the lens of skin studies, we see with even more clarity the thinness of the argument that addiction is legible from corporeal evidence. I conclude that while we may want skin to tell us things about others, it nevertheless behooves us to be wary of what we think skin tells us about addiction.
... This was not a simple valorization of Western bias or ideals of beauty, but rather the consequences of negotiating cultural hegemony and regimes of power that objectified race in the realm of the domestic. As Anne McClintock points out, the domestic was a construction in colonialism to maintain hegemony over the division of labor at home and the subordinate "Other" abroad (McClintock 1994). In the representation of the domestic and popular culture, the black subject has either been erased or stereotyped as objects of servitude, caricature, fear, and desire. ...
Article
In an oral history workshop as part of the installation-based exhibition The Front Room ‘Inna Joburg’ at the FADA Gallery, Johannesburg (2016), black women from Soweto shared stories about the crochet doilies they had made and brought with them, which resonated with me on a trans-diasporic level by invoking memories of how my mother acquired crochet ‘sets’ from friends and work colleagues. They often made their crochet doilies as domestic labourers in the homes of white employers under apartheid in South Africa, and before my mother came to England in 1960, she worked as a maid for a Dutch family for six years in Curacao. As a form of knitting thread with a hooked needle, black women across the African diaspora have transformed colonialised crochet into colourful three-dimensional sculptural pieces where each doily is unique to the individual maker. This essay will look at how crocheting in the diasporic domestic interior create express postcolonial modernity, aspirations, creative agency, entrepreneurship, creolised aesthetics, femininity, belonging and becoming that challenge and resist colonial representations of black women as not respectable, good spouses and home-makers.
... 'Natives' were depicted as happy in their servitude in advertisements for goods from the colonies, such as cocoa, coffee, tea and sugar. McClintock (1994aMcClintock ( , 1994b argues that as international competition intensified between the colonial powers, so advertising and marketing strategies became more aggressive and sophisticated, contributing in no small measure to the establishment of consumer culture in the metropolitan powers. Branding too was an outgrowth of this form of advertising, McClintock argues, and the soap industry in particular was marked by the rise of large corporations, thus being in the forefront of a growing trend in Western capitalism. ...
Article
In this ground-breaking book, Shaun Best analyses the intellectual knowledge production of Zygmunt Bauman and his rise to academic stardom in the English speaking world by evaluating the relation between his biography, the contexts in which he found himself and why his intellectual creativity is admired by so many people.
... Children books such as Little Black Sambo, perpetrated the "pickaninny" racial stereotypes of African Americans. Advertisers exploited stereotypes of the Black body to sell its products, a process termed commodity racism (McClintock 1994). These racist depictions and organizations, along with federal and state government policies (or lack thereof) would be the catalyst for racial violence, Jim Crow segregation and Black persons' exploitation in the justice system, which continued throughout the first half of the twentieth century. ...
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Artykuł skupia się na wielokrotnie podejmowanych kwestiach, dotyczących fotografii jako narzędzia komunikacji oraz tzw. analfabetyzmu wizualnego. Przedmiotem rozważań stał się specyficzny gatunek medium – fotografia natychmiastowa (polaroid), rozumiana nie tylko jako wizualny komunikat, ale i materialny obiekt. Wykorzystując badania z obszaru nowego materializmu i studiów nad rzeczami, analizom poddane zostały przypadki pojawiania się polaroidów na styku kontrastujących kultur. Dotyczy to m.in. używania procesów natychmiastowych przez pochodzących z krajów zachodnich antropologów, podróżników i artystów w trakcie podróży do regionów drugiego i trzeciego świata, zamieszkałych przez osoby niezaznajomione z tym rodzajem fotografii. Aparaty polaroid, które wynaleziono dla zachodnich fotografów rodzinnych stały się ważnym narzędziem międzykulturowej komunikacji, ale i przekupywania autochtonów, zawłaszczania kultur, rywalizacji politycznej oraz podkreślania cywilizacyjnej dominacji USA.
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This article examines the obsession that British women during the Victorian period had with pure, white skin. Examining the ways in which pale skin became popular, it is possible to see that this preoccupation created a new and increased demand for products and potions that would give the illusion of a milky white complexion, the epitome of beauty, regardless of their toxic composition. The preference for natural products, like soap, became popular as poisonous powders and lotions came under scrutiny. Advertisements assisted with the obsession, with the British views of beauty, morality, purity, youthfulness, and racial superiority becoming intertwined with notions of whiteness. Messages likes these ensured that women would do whatever it took to achieve the ideal beauty, even if it was dangerous to their health.
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To comprehend how British advertising gained its unique identity, this study reviews historical events and phenomena such as imperialism and Brexit, discusses the cultural structure of British society, and considers the advertising industry's political-economic structure. It utilises a modern branch of critical discourse analysis called multimodal discourse analysis and extensively studies the HSBC TV commercial titled ‘Home To So Much More', focusing on how its visuals create and represent Britishness and the British way of making advertisements.
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Globalization has prompted a multicultural retheorization of both consumer and market (Fu et al., 2014; Riefler et al., 2012; Kipnis et al., 2019). In short, the Canadian multicultural market consists of international goods which are authentic, domestic goods purporting authenticity (e.g., orientalizing), and multinational, fusion innovations that are authentic-ish (e.g., self-orientalizing; Hui, 2019; Li, 2020; Stephens, 2021). What results is a fetishistic commercialization of multiculturalism, where brands are packaging ethnicity and race to vie for consumer attention. This paper addresses the latter variety — self-orientalist packaging designed for products born out of (formerly) Chinese Canadian enterprises, namely Wong Wing Fried Rice. Developing an analytical and theoretical approach that can support the identification of racialization, racist typologies are situated in graphic design. Themes derived from the analysis include racism, orientalism, self-orientalism, exoticism, cultural appropriation, among others. Findings reveal how self-orientalist packaging and label design is discursively negotiated as both internalized racism and anti-racist resistance, necessitating a more nuanced approach that reflects the sociopolitical context in which products are branded. The adoption of transversalist tenets, an anti-racist modality outlined by the methodological component of this study, presents one possibility.
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Reading Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863) makes it possible for Esperanza Cordero to imagine an idyllic site of empowered identity in The House on Mango Street. Yet, I argue that Esperanza’s transformed identity can only reside outside her original community and that her journey from the sad red house of Mango Street to her reconceived clean house at the end of the text is necessarily a trajectory of desired uprootedness that follows the script presented in The Water-Babies. Like Tom, Kingsley’s protagonist, Esperanza undergoes a metamorphosis to shed off the traits that categorize her as Chicana in order to embrace a remodeled subjectivity and, consequently, become an ontologically deterritorialized Hispanic.
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This article interrogates how and why courtesan identities are simultaneously embraced and disavowed by Brahman dancers. Using a combination of ethnographic and critical feminist methods, which allow the author to toggle between the past and the present, between India and the United States, and between film analysis and the dance studio, the author examines the cultural politics of the romanticized and historical Indian dancer—the mythical courtesan. The author argues that the mythical courtesan was called into existence through film cultures in the early twentieth century to provide a counterpoint against which a modern and national Brahmanical womanhood could be articulated. The author brings together a constellation of events that participated in the construction of Indian womanhood, especially the rise of sound film against the backdrop of growing anticolonial and nationalist sentiments in early twentieth-century South India. The author focuses on films that featured an early twentieth-century dancer-singer-actress, Sundaramma. In following her career through Telugu film and connecting it to broader conversations about Indian womanhood in the 1930s and 1940s, the author traces the contours of an affective triangle between three mutually constituting emotional points: pleasure, shame, and disgust.
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The idea of Teaching Empires originated during the 6th Gender Research Conference in Łódź, Poland, when Teaching with Memories (2006) was launched by Working Group 1b4 Athena 2. The book has been a success in European teaching and a third printing (2007) is distributed internationally by Syracuse University Press. Many contributors felt that their deep commitment to teaching and a good working atmosphere needed a new project. Since then, the Working Group, Teaching Empires, met at the annual Athena meetings in Budapest in 2006 and in Madrid in 2007. Members of the working group devised teaching exercises, shared local experiences and memories of empire, made presentations of their teaching materials and drew upon the commentary and questions of peers. An important first step, for instance, was to devise an inventory of courses on empire being taught in higher education. Thanks to funding from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation and co-sponsorship by the Centre for Gender Studies at Stockholm University, the group was given the opportunity to have an extra workshop on “Women and Transnational Citizenship: Researching Teaching Empires” at Stockholm University, in May 2008. The workshop was also dedicated to preparing for the teaching at the Central European University in Budapest in the autumn term of 2008. In Budapest, over the course of the autumn term, members of the Working Group offered a course, “Women and Transnational citizenship, Teaching Empires”, to post-graduate students of gender. Exploring the internet as a site for teaching at the CEU, we developed a moodle e-learning platform where we uploaded the teaching material as well as films connected to the themes of the course. Students were required to address one film in relation to their chosen topic in the final paper in order to ensure that the visual was represented.
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As one of the most stereotyped minorities, the Roma are particularly ‘good to think’ in relation to constructions of Europeanness. In the production of ‘Gypsiness’, the body, the space, and the materiality of the dwelling are linked through smell as signifiers of a racial and cultural inferiority that does not ‘belong’ in and to Europe. Drawing on research projects carried out in the outskirts of Rome and in a small Romanian town, our contribution relies on a juxtaposed ethnography of constructions of ‘Gypsiness’ in relation to the spatial, sensorial and material inscriptions of the body. The article will examine the relationship between space and the social production of smell, discussing how spaces inhabited by Roma play a role in ‘doing’ Europeanness in a contrastive mode.
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The role dirt can play is immense: “(F)ilth represents a cultural location at which the human body, social hierarchy, psychological subjectivity, and material objects converge. Even just the thought of dirt has an immediate emotional and (often) also physical impact on us, expressed typically as aversion: “our dislike of dirt (…) is so strong that we tend to avoid touching, tasting, smelling, looking at, or even speaking or writing about, dirt and dirty things”. At the same time, dirt in various forms often evokes an ambivalent appeal and fascination even, again with a potentially strong impact on our emotions.
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This book uses controversies as a gateway through which to explore the origins, ethics, key moments, and people in the history of anthropology. It draws on a variety of cases including complicity in "human zoos", Malinowski’s diaries, and the Human Terrain System to explore how anthropological controversies act as a driving force for change, how they offer a window into the history of and research practice in the discipline, and how they might frame wider debates such as those around reflexivity, cultural relativism, and the politics of representation. The volume provokes discussion about research ethics and practice with tangible examples where gray areas are brought into sharp relief. The controversies examined in the book all involve moral or practical ambiguities that offer an opportunity for students to engage with the debate and the dilemmas faced by anthropologists, both in relation to the specific incidents covered and to the problems posed more generally due to the intimate and political implications of ethnographic research.
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Based upon Foucauldian and Derridean post-structuralist philosophy of language, Sousa Santos and Menezes de Souza’s sociological approaches to language, Hall’s productive conceptualization of culture and on Mirzoeff, Stam and Shohat’s visual studies, this paper seeks to engage with discussions on visual culture, cultural translation and language education. Of qualitative/interpretative nature, this reflection is divided into five main sections: in the introduction, it presents philosophical and sociological approaches to (visual) language and culture. Section one problematizes visual culture by means of the genealogy of invisible bodies. Next section evolves from the grammar-translation model to cultural translation in visual culture. Then, it revisits and deconstructs dominant literacy models through cultural translation. Finally, this genealogical perspective towards the visual shows how the traditional historical formations have taken over back again the political and educational scenarios in our country, and thus sadly promoted a politics of manipulation and alienation.
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The popular leisure cultures and spaces of New York examined in this book are permeated by women’s bodies and they instigate the modernity that is most directly expressed and embodied in the poetry of women writers. This is palpably the case with the modern cultures of consumerism. Focusing on accounts of shopping, fashion and advertising in the work of Gertrude Stein, Lola Ridge, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven this chapter explores how modernist women writers engage with gender and consumerism in their poetry. The chapter examines how this poetry maintains a critical stance on the expropriations of consumerism while acknowledging, and often celebrating, that modern femininity emerges from the productive assemblages of technology, space, language and consumption in the modern city.
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Este artigo tem como objetivo refletir acerca do modo como o Ocidente foi criando e se relacionando historicamente com o Outro, salientando a importância da diferença e da representação, conceitos chave na teoria pós-colonial. Partindo da constatação que um dos campos contemporâneos mais relevantes para a análise das trocas interculturais é o dos media, ao longo do texto discute-se a forma como os discursos hegemónicos do passado se atualizaram e adaptaram, mas também o modo como práticas alternativas emancipatórias e diálogos efetivos podem ser concretizados.
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The prevailing wisdom in many US marketing circles is that Whites do not comprise a discrete consumer segment. However, just because Whiteness is not explicitly named in marketing discourse does not mean that advertisers have never targeted a White market. Over the course of the twentieth century, Whiteness has been rendered synonymous with the marketing industry’s unmarked category for the average American consumer. First known in industry terminology as the “mass market” but currently termed the “general market,” the historical development of these concepts is inextricably tied to the long-standing practice of racial segregation in the USA. This chapter offers a historical survey and analysis of the racialized invention of the mass market in American marketing discourse and argues that by centering Whiteness and separating people of color as distinct from the mass, American market research and segmentation practices serve as key sites of knowledge production through which the politics of racial segregation are both mirrored and maintained.
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By considering the supermarket as a racial space, the chapter draws attention to consumption spaces as sites for daily mundane activities that are often unreflective and routine, and as such are pregnant indicators of how interactions between different types of bodies and people become embedded in everyday spaces. While this is useful in understanding contemporary everyday racisms, it more importantly highlights how the effect produced in an encounter can still be racialised regardless of intent and proximity. Racism is not overcome merely by having bodies in close proximity; it requires a shift in how bodies interact in spaces.
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Purpose This paper aims to track how African-American or black male advertising models are viewed by male consumers within the context of dramatic ongoing cultural and legal change. It provides broader implications for other ethnic minorities. Design/methodology/approach A content analysis of black male advertising images culled from over 60 years of issues of two male-targeted magazines assesses these changes. The analysis contextualizes the imagery in African-American history and general media portrayals periodized into seven historical phases. Findings Results indicate that the number of black male advertising representations has exploded in the past 30 years from virtual invisibility to over 20 per cent of all male ad images. Roles have migrated from representations of black ad models as servants and porters to a wide range of images of black men in professional contexts. However, black males, relative to white males, are disproportionately presented in ads as athletic figures and celebrities and rarely depicted in romantic situations. Research limitations/implications This research focuses on two popular male-targeted publications, thereby limiting its scope. Relatively few black male images (relative to white male images) are to be found in print advertisements in these publications. Practical implications This research assists business practitioners as they create business and marketing strategies to meet the needs of an ever more diverse marketplace. Social implications The disproportionately large number of black male depictions as athletes and sports celebrities is indicative of remnant racism and minority stereotyping in American society. Originality/value This research builds upon work done by Kassarjian (1969, 1971) on black advertising images. Its originality stems from a specific focus on male models as viewed by male consumers, the addition of historic context and periodization to this history and the updating of past research by almost half a century.
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The foolish Harlequin’s signature black mask links this initially dim-witted clown’s blackness with pan-European traditions of the “natural fool,” a rationally impaired butt often marked via blackface. It invokes traditions that can be traced from ancient theatre, where a comic typology of blackness passed from Hellenistic theatrical masks of smiling Africans to soot-smeared Roman phallophores, the humiliating first-century face-blackening episode of the Satyricon, and illustrations of dark-masked slaves in Terence codices housed in monastic libraries. Evidence of early blackface comic traditions and conventions being adopted in Christian iconography first appears in Augustine’s early fifth-century work The City of God. In drama, these influences ranged from face-blackening episodes in Hrotsvitha’s neo-Terentian drama to foolish devils like the popular Latinate devil Titivillus/Tutuvillus and other comic devils such as “Hellequine.” Far from being the product of any singular unbroken lineage, then, Harlequin was a cultural palimpsest of closely related tropes. He was portrayed as African by the first known Harlequin touring Europe from 1584 to 1621 and late seventeenth-century illustrations of “Dominique” Biancolelli through Cowardy, Cowardy Custard; or Harlequin Jim Crow and the Magic Mustard Pot (1836). Whether recognized as racial impersonation or not, Harlequin codified what would become proto-racist comic stereotypes about blackness, including laughable sartorial pretension and inept misspeaking.
Article
This essay argues that Orwell’s representation of animals as companion species offers a strikingly new, as-yet largely neglected view of animal agency and interiority in his work. In “Shooting an Elephant”, Burmese Days and “Marrakech”, the writer’s focus on the social reject is supplemented by a marked sense of community implying human tragedy yet framing it within precariously situated human-animal, colonial or urban-imperial transitions that visualise animals as agents of change and co-shaping species interdependent with the lives of the humans that utilize and domineer them. Animals are required whenever Orwell aspires to shift from isolation to communality, from the self-conscious outsider to the larger realm of ideas framing the world in which his characters strive to overstep the accepted lines of social performance and conformity. Read in and around disciplinary structures of rationalization, Orwell’s animals appear to secure themselves, quite paradoxically, a place within the normative anthropocentric framework excluding them. They extend beyond anthropomorphising or allegorical modes of description and open up bio-political perspectives within and across regimes of knowledge and empathy. Orwell’s writings thus present a challenge to the culturally accredited fantasy of human exceptionalism, collapsing any epistemic space between humans and animals and burying the idea of sustaining radical species distinction.
Article
Over the past several decades, cultural studies scholars have shown a keen interest in the symbiosis between mass media and medicine, paying substantial attention to the capacity of media to construct meanings and images of health and disease and their material effects. In this article, I attempt to extend the insights of this scholarship into the historical context of colonial Korea under the non-western imperial power of Japan in the early 20th century. I critically analyze medical images and health discourses in print media to interrogate the ways in which these images and texts were interwoven in the production of novel ideas, metaphors, and notions of health, illness, and the body in the colonial modernity of Korea under Japanese rule (1910–45). Medical illustrations, along with texts in the vernacular newspapers and their patent medicine advertisements, powerfully forged visions of “ideal” male and female bodies at the intersection of Japanese colonialism, Korean nationalism, and modernity.
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Helen Lansdowne was instrumental in the creation of the Woodbury’s Facial Soap advertising campaign; she spent months on research and product analysis prior to the initial educational/scientific campaign in 1910.1 Lansdowne is also credited with the provocative campaign slogan “A Skin You Love To Touch,” which debuted in 1914 and was accompanied by a sensual and romantic image and supporting ad copy. The ad captured the imagination of the American public and educated women on various skin problems.2 Lansdowne’s Woodbury’s ad campaign is listed as one of the top ten achievements of J. Walter Thompson (JWT) in one of its company histories. And the Woodbury’s slogan “A Skin You Love To Touch” came to be the “descriptive trademark” of the Woodbury products, which embody “beauty, and the love, envy and admiration beauty engenders.”3
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