Race, Ethnicity, and Consumer Culture
Bauer, Raymond A., and Scott M. Cunningham. “The Negro Market.” Journal of Advertising Research 10 (1970): 3-13.
Bay, Mia, and Ann Fabian, eds. Race and Retail: Consumption Across the Color Line. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015.
Berkman, Dave. “Advertising in Ebony and Life: Negro Aspirations vs. Reality,” Journalism Quarterly 40, no. 1 (Winter 1963): 53-64.
“Black Image Makers on Madison Avenue.” Black Enterprise (February 1971): 15–17; 20–22.
Blackwelder, Julia Kirk. Styling Jim Crow: African-American Beauty Training during Segregation. College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2003.
Boime, Albert. The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century. Washington DC: Smithsonian, 1990.
Boyd, Robert L. “Black Retail Enterprise and Racial Segregation in Northern Cities before the ‘Ghetto.’” Sociological Perspectives 53 (Fall 2010): 397–417.
Branchik, Blaine J., and Judy Foster Davis. “From Servants to Spokesmen: Black Male Advertising Models and Changing US Culture Post World War II.” Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 10:4 (2018): 451-477.
Brooks, Dwight E. “Consumer Markets and Consumer Magazines: Black America and the Culture of Consumption,1920-1960.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 1991.
Brooks, Dwight Ernest. “In Their Own Words: Advertisers’ Construction of an African American Consumer Market, the World War II Era.” Howard Journal of Communication 6: 1/2 (October 1995): 32-52.
Chambers, Jason. “Equal in Every Way: African- Americans, Consumption and Materialism from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement.” Advertising and Society Review 7:1 (2006).
Chambers, Jason. Madison Avenue and the Color Line: African Americans in the Advertising Industry. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
Chambers, Jason P. “Work that Mattered: Emmett McBain and the Creation of Positive Realism in Advertising.” Advertising & Society Quarterly 19:4 (2018).
Chapko, Michael K. “Black Ads Are Getting Blacker.” Journal of Communications 26 (Autumn 1976): 175-178.
Choudhury, Pravat K., and Lawrence S. Schmidt. “Black Models in Advertising to Blacks.” Journal of Advertising Research 14 (June 1974): 19-22.
Cinotto, Simone. Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.
Clark Davis, Joshua. “For the Record: How African American Consumers and Music Retailers Created Commercial Public Space in the 1960s and 1970s South.” Southern Cultures 17:4 (Winter 2011): 71-90.
Cserno, Isabell. “Race and Mass Consumption in Consumer Culture: National Trademark Advertising Campaigns in the US and Germany, 1890-1930.” PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, 2008.
David, Siobhan. “Fashioning Essence Women and Ebony Men: Sartorial Instruction and the New Politics of Racial Uplift in Print, 1970–1993.” PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 2011.
Davis, James C. Commerce in Color: Race, Consumer Culture, and American Literature, 1893-1933. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.
Davis, Judy Foster. “Realizing Marketplace Opportunity: How Research on the Black Consumer Market Influences Mainstream Marketers, 1920-1970.” Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 5:4 (2013): 471-493.
DeSantis, Alan Douglas. “Selling the American Dream: The Chicago Defender and the Great Migration of 1915-1919.” PhD dissertation, University of Indiana, 1993.
Dolan, Mark K. “Extra! Chicago Defender Race Records Ads Show South from Afar.” Southern Cultures 13 (Fall 2007): 106–24.
Dolber, Brian. “Commodifying Alternative Media Audiences: A Historical Case Study of the Jewish Daily Forward.” Communication, Culture & Critique 9:2 (2016): 175-192.
Edwards, Paul K. The Southern Urban Negro as Consumer. New York: Prentice Hall, 1932.
Foster Davis, Judy. Pioneering African-American Women in the Advertising Business. New York: Routledge, 2017.
Geizer, Ronald. “Advertising in Ebony, 1960 and 1969.” Journalism Quarterly 48:1 (1971): 131-134.
Gordon, Tammy S. “Take Amtrak to Black History: Marketing Heritage Tourism to African Americans in the 1970s.” Journal of Tourism History 7:1/2 (April/August 2015): 54-74.
Heard, Sandra Rena. “The ‘Bad’ Black Consumer: A Study of African-American Consumer Culture in Washington, D.C., 1910s–1930s.” PhD dissertation, George Washington University, 2010.
Hillman, Betty Luther. Dressing for the Culture Wars: Style and the Politics of Self-Presentation in the 1960s and 1970s. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.
Humphrey, Ronald, and Harold Schuman. “The Portrayal of Blacks in Magazine Advertisements, 1950-1982.” Public Opinion Quarterly 48:3 (1984): 551-563.
Imai, Shiho. Creating the Nisei Market: Race and Citizenship in Japanese American Consumer Culture. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010.
Kassarjian, Harold H. “The Negro and American Advertising, 1946-1965.” Journal of Marketing Research 6:1 (1969): 29-39.
Kern-Foxworth, Marilyn. Aunt Jemina, Uncle Ben, and Rastus: Blacks in Advertising, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.
Kinlock Sewell, Stacy. “The ‘Not-Buying Power’ of the Black Community: Urban Boycotts and Equal Employment Opportunity, 1960-1964.” Journal of African-American History 89:2 (Spring 2004): 135-151.
Gibson, D. Parke. The $30 Billion Negro. New York: MacMillan, 1969.
Gitter, A. George, Stephen M. O’Connell, and David Mostofsky. “Trends in Appearance of Models in Ebony Ads over 17 Years.” Journalism Quarterly 49 (1972): 547-550.
Goings, Kenneth. Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black Collectibles and American Stereotyping. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Haidarali, Laila. Brown Beauty: Color, Sex, and Race from Harlem Renaissance to World War II. New York: NYU Press, 2018.
Ibrahim, Yasmin. “The Negro Marketing Dilemma.” Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 8:4 (2016): 545-563.
O’Barr, William M. Culture and the Ad: Exploring Otherness in the World of Advertising. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994.
O’Barr, of Duke University, provides a basic instruction manual for reading the subtextual messages related to race and “otherness” in advertising. Employing Marxist and semiotic theory, he argues that advertisements contain representations of ideology and power relationships in addition to their intended commercial messages. This secondary discourse instructs readers or viewers with conceptions of hierarchy, dominance and subordination, the ultimate meaning of which is determined by the individuals who encounter them. Because advertisements often employ stereotypes or present images out of context, representations contained in them are typically inaccurate and tend to lead viewers to construct meanings along preconceived, and often biased, ideas. The book uses examples from history and contemporary advertising. Heavily illustrated with black and white reproductions of many advertisements.
Jackson, Peter. “Black Male: Advertising and the Cultural Politics of Masculinity.” Gender, Place, and Culture 1:4 (1994): 49-59.
Joyce, George. The Black Consumer: Dimensions of Behavior and Strategy. New York: Random House, 1921.
Lacy, S. “The Advertising Content of African American Newspapers.” Journalism Quarterly 71:3 (1994): 521-530.
Leslie, Michael. “Slow Fade to ?: Advertising in Ebony Magazine.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 72 (Summer 1995): 426-436.
McKaffy, Marilyn M. “Advertising Race/Racing Advertising: The Feminine Consumer (Nation), 1876-1900.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 23:1 (1997): 131-174.
Mangun, Kimberley and Lisa M. Parcell. “The Pet Milk Company ‘Happy Family’ Advertising Campaign: A Groundbreaking Appeal to the Negro Market of the 1950s.” Journalism History 40:2 (Summer 2014): 70-84.
Manring, M.M. Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998.
Marcellus, Jane. “Nervous Women and Noble Savages: The Romanticized Other in Nineteenth Century US Patent Medicine Advertising.” Journal of Popular Culture 41:5 (October 2008): 784-808.
McAndrew, Malia. “A Twentieth-Century Triangle Trade: Selling Black Beauty at Home and Abroad, 1945-1965.” Enterprise & Society 11:4 (December 2010): 784-810.
Meyer, Carter J., and Diana Royer, eds. Selling the Indian: Commercializing and Appropriating American Indian Cultures. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001.
Moore, Marian J. “The Advertising Images of Black Americans, 1880–1920 and 1968–1979: A Thematic and Interpretive Approach.” PhD dissertation, Bowling Green State University, 1986.
Morgan, Jo-Ann. “African-American Women in Nineteenth Century Visual Culture.” PhD dissertation, University of California-Los Angeles, 1997.
Moss, Janice Ward. The History and Advancement of African Americans in the Advertising Industry, 1895-1999. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003.
Pattillo-McCoy, Mary. Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Pieterse, Jan P. White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
Regev, Ronny. “We Want no More Economic Islands: The Mobilization of the Black Consumer Market in the Postwar US.” History of Retailing and Consumption 6:1 (2020): 45-69.
Rooks, Noliwe M. Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African-American Women. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996.
Ruffins, F. Davis. “Reflecting on Ethnic Imagery in the Landscape of Commerce” in Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, Susan Strasser, et.al., eds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Sandy-Bailey, Julia L. “The Negro Market and the Black Freedom Movement in New York City, 1930-1965.” PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 2006.
Sewell, Stacy Kinlock. “The ‘Not-Buying Power’ of the Black Community: Urban Boycotts and Equal Employment Opportunity, 1960-1964.” Journal of African-American History 89:2 (Spring 2004): 135-151.
Sheehan, Elizabeth M. “To Exist Serially: Black Radical Magazines and Beauty Culture, 1917–1919.” The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 9, no. 1 (2018): 30–52.
Steele, Jeffery. “Reduced to Images: American Indians in Nineteenth-Century Advertising,” in Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture, ed. S. Elizabeth Bird. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996.
Swenson, Jill D. “African-Americans and Advertising: Race and Representation in U.S. History.” Communication Quarterly 43:3 (Summer 1996): 395.
Wailoo, Keith. Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.
Walker, Susannah. Style & Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920–1975. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007.
Walker, Susannah. “Black Dollar Power: Assessing African American Consumerism since 1945,” in African American Urban History since World War II, ed. Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Weems Jr., Robert E. “The Revolution Will be Marketed: American Corporations and Black Consumers During the 1960s,” Radical History Review 59 (Spring 1994): 94-107
Weems, Jr., Robert E. Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century. New York: New York University Press, 1998.
Weems, Robert E., Jr. “African American Consumers since World War II,” in African American Urban History since World War II, ed. Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Wonkeryor, Edward L., ed. Dimensions of Racism in Advertising: From Slavery to the Twenty-First Century. New York: Peter Lang, 2015.
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