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We live in an age in which advertising is part of the fabric of our lives. Advertising in its modern form largely has its origins in the later nineteenth century. This book is the first to provide a historical survey of images of black people in advertising during the colonial period. It highlights the way in which racist representations continually developed and shifted throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, depending on the particular political and economic interests of the producers of these images. The book analyses the various conflicting, and changing ideologies of colonialism and racism in British advertising, revealing reveal the purposes to which these images of dehumanisation and exploitation were employed. The first part deals with images of Africa, the second deals with images of black people in the West, and the third considers questions relating to issues about images and social representations in general. The Eurocentric image of the 'savage' and 'heathen', the period of slavery, European exploration and missionary activity, as well as the colonisation of Africa in the nineteenth century are explored. Representations of the servant, the entertainer, and the exotic man or woman with a rampant sexuality are also presented. The key strategy with which images of black people from the colonial period have been considered is that of stereotyping. The material interests of soap manufacturers, cocoa manufacturers, tea advertising, and tobacco advertising are discussed. The book explains the four particular types of imagery dominate corporate advertising during the 1950s and early 1960s.
institutions employed images of black people at given historical moments, in order to represent ideological perspectives which promoted their interests. The book highlights the way in which racist representations continually developed and shifted throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, depending on the particular political and economic interests of the producers of these images. The aim has not been
: Africa has the potential to rise if it can ever get itself out of crisis’ (Pierre 2018 : 12). Images of African otherness circulate alongside a denial of African agency: what matters is the investment decisions made by external financiers, and their ‘risk appetites’. Ilias Alami ( Chapter 10 ) explores the particular ways in which financiers investing in South Africa discount Black African rule and cast Black African workers as unruly and threatening to capital. At issue here is not merely the notion that racist representations repel much-needed investment. The
aesthetic pleasure, leisure consumption and virtual adventure’ (Bandy, cited in Holland and Huggan 2000: 179). Thus, we should expect narratives which are better able to describe landscape and people in other countries in ways which challenge the distancing, racist representations of the nineteenth century; but often what we find in travel texts such as Bruce Chatwin’s writing is a taking refuge in stylistic virtuosity which for some critics marks ‘a refusal to engage with the actualities of human and political contact’ (Taylor, 1999: 210
observing images of Africa who has an interest in reflecting on their emotional responses would do well to recognise the racialised and racist characteristics of British culture, even if these have softened as the age of empire becomes more distant.2 I was exposed to racist representations of Africans from my early years: I can remember a teacher at primary school (I must have been between 5 and 10 years old) telling us – in the idiom of a storytelling homily – that God punished some humans for being bad by spraying them black, but because they were standing up with their
(this time together with the blackness of the troops of another Saracen ruler, Marganice) by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen in his article ‘On Saracen Enjoyment’: Like monsters, racist representations inevitably conjoin desire and disgust. The Saracens were no exception. The extended visualizations of ‘lusty, black-skinned people’ in the Chanson de Roland , for example, brought ‘the darkness of Africa’ queerly close to Christianity, a temptation within a threat. The poem describes both Margariz, whose
-European people in British advertising, Anandi Ramamurthy contends that ‘[i]mages are historical documents’: They do not simply reflect the ideological perspectives of an era, but form part of the process through which these ideologies are produced … racist representations continually developed and shifted through the
public health policies in order to reinforce prejudices in racist representations of immigrants. A significant examination of the triptych ‘borders–disease–racism’ is provided by Natalia Molina in her studies about Mexican immigrants to the USA from the nineteenth century onwards. 20 Molina illustrates how US public health services initiated and implemented cleaning rituals at the borders that racialised Mexican immigrants. The racist attitudes were manifested in the ways in which, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Mexican immigrants to the USA were depicted
vulnerability, pain, or even death, but they build on it and draw affective force from it, just like in the previously discussed #BlackLivesMatter campaigning. These are themes discussed in this book, especially by Ylva Habel, who interrogates Swedish debates on anti-black racist representations through the lens of afro-pessimist theory. The double edge of vulnerability –its connections to regulation, subjugation, and death on one hand, and its power to bring together and mobilise political agency on the other –has indeed been keenly examined in queer theorising. While
racist representations of black newcomers in London’. 15 However, rather than merely mentioning instances of white Londoners’ casual racism towards black immigrants from New Commonwealth countries, Lessing also demonstrates that these attitudes impinge on ‘Doris’ indirectly. Before she settles in Flo and Dan’s house, the narrator goes to see some rooms she has heard are to let and is asked where she is from. She is also told that the landlady ‘won’t take foreigners’ (37). When she asks what is meant by a foreigner, the woman showing her the rooms asks her again where