Colonial Advertising & Commodity Racism is the latest volume in LIT Verlag's series Racism Analysis - Series B: Yearbooks. This series explores racial discrimination in all its varying historical, ideological, and cultural patterns. It examines the invention of race and the dimensions of modern racism, and it inquires into racism avant la lettre. Racism Analysis brings together scholars from various disciplines and schools of thought, with the key aim of contributing to the conceptualization of racism and to identify the practices of dehumanization that are intrinsic to it. The contents of Colonial Advertising & Commodity Racism include: Advertising White Supremacy: Capitalism, Colonialism, and Commodity Racism * Come and Join the Freedom-Lovers: Race, Appropriation, and Resistance in Advertising * Buffalo Bill's Wild West: The Racialization of the Cosmopolitan Imagination * Fun Without Vulgarity? Commodity Racism and the Promotion of Blackface Fantasies * From Oecumene to Trademark: The Symbolism of the Moor in the Occident * Bittersweet Temptations: Race and the Advertising of Cocoa * The German Alternative: Nationalism and Racism in Afri-Cola. (Series: Racism Analysis - Series B: Yearbooks - Vol. 4)

David Ciarlo offers an innovative visual history of each of these transformations. Tracing commercial imagery across different products and media, Ciarlo shows how and why the "African native" had emerged by 1900 to become a familiar figure in the German landscape, selling everything from soap to shirts to coffee. The racialization of black figures, first associated with the American minstrel shows that toured Germany, found ever greater purchase in German advertising up to and after 1905, when Germany waged war against the Herero in Southwest Africa. The new reach of advertising not only expanded the domestic audience for German colonialism, but transformed colonialism's political and cultural meaning as well as, by infusing it with a simplified racial cast.

Lury weaves unique arguments over the expansive nature of consumption, including explanations as to how poorer segments of society do in fact contribute to consumer culture and how a commodity moves beyond its function and assumes a cultural and symbolic meaning. Not only does the author explore the way an individual's position in social groups structured by class, gender, race, and age affects the nature of his or her participation in consumer culture, but also how this culture itself is instrumental in the defining of social and political groups and the forming of an individual's self-identity.

Although modern racism was fully developed by their time, Marx (and Engels) did not engage in a theoretical discussion of its essential features. This analytical silence is investigated in the chapter Marx and Haiti: Notes on a Blank Space. At the same time, the chapters of this volume demonstrate that and why the principles of a historical materialist analysis of society present links for a critical theory of racism. In the chapter Dehumanization and Social Death: Fundamentals of Racism, this is shown concerning the various historical shapes of racisms caused by different forms of class relations. The chapter Racismflq: Birth of a Concept connects the conceptual history of racism with the socio-historical conflicts of differently affected social groups. Finally, the chapter A Historical Materialist Theory of Racism: Introduction addresses basic elements of a Marxist analysis of racism. It elucidates the necessity of a theoretical conjunction of classist and racist discrimination as well as the historical differentiation of racisms.

Since the beginning of commodity culture, products have been marketed with images reflecting racist concepts of otherness. Using the prominent examples of three companies - Uncle Ben's, Sarotti, and Banania - this book examines how racist trademark figures were established in the U.S., Germany, and France, and built on nation-specific processes of racial stereotyping. While it finds that the three figures mirror their national histories of slavery, Orientalism, and colonialism, the book reveals that their paths through popular culture also followed strikingly similar patterns. Conceived in an era of overt racism, each symbol was challenged by social movements over the course of the 20th century and became increasingly marginalized in promotional activities. In the early 2000s, however, all three figures were relaunched with supposedly new makeovers, hitting once again at the heart of commodity culture and illustrating the subtle prevalence of racist stereotypes. (Series: Racism Analysis - Series A: Studies - Vol. 3)

The "White Australia Policy" - the country's historical policy that favored immigration to Australia from various European countries, especially Britain - has largely been discussed with regard only to its political-ideological perspective. No account was taken of the central problem of racist societalization, i.e. the everyday production and reproduction of race as a social relation (doing race) supported by broad sections of the population. This comprehensive study of Australian racism and the historical "white sugar" campaign shows that the latter was only able to achieve success because it was embedded in a widespread white Australia culture that found expression in all spheres of life. (Series: Racism Analysis - Series A: Studies - Vol. 4) [Subject: Social History, Australian Studies]

This open access book offers an entangled history of hygiene by showing how knowledge of purity, health and cleanliness was shaped by evangelical medical missionaries and their encounters with people in West Africa. By tracing the interactions and negotiations of six Basel Mission doctors, who practised on the Gold Coast and in Cameroon from 1885 to 1914, the author demonstrates how notions of religious purity, scientific health and colonial cleanliness came together in the making of hygiene during the age of High Imperialism. The heyday of evangelical medical missions abroad coincided with the emergence of tropical medicine as a scientific discipline during what became known as the Scramble for Africa. This book reveals that these projects were intertwined and that hygiene played an important role in all three of them. While most historians have examined modern hygiene as a European, bourgeois and scientific phenomenon, the author highlights both the colonial and the religious fabric of hygiene, which continues to shape our understanding of purity, health and cleanliness to this day.