Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T09:16:22.716Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Getting Inside the Skin of the Consumer: Race, Market Research and the Consumerist Project in Apartheid South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 April 2018

Deborah Posel
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article engages questions of colonial intimacy in the context of the market – specifically, by white commercial sector in apartheid South Africa to lure black South Africans into burgeoning consumer markets. I focus on the 1960s, when the exercise in racial domination grew more ambitious and coercive, at the same time as buoyant economic growth efforts spurred consumerist desire. African consumers were largely invisible and incomprehensible to white businesspeople, who turned to advertisers and market researchers to bring ‘the African consumer’ to light. This was largely an epistemological challenge – the pursuit of new modes of knowledge about African people, and especially the material intimacies of their daily lives. This article examines this knowledge-making project, along with the anxieties, lapses and contradictions that inhered in it.

Keywords

Advertisingmarket researchraceconsumerismapartheid
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 42 , Special Issue 1: The Private Lives of Empire: Emotion, Intimacy, and Colonial Rule , April 2018 , pp. 120 - 138
Copyright
© 2018 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Deborah Posel is professor of sociology at the Institute of Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town.

References

Bibliography

Unpublished primary sources Google Scholar
Hagley Library, Wilmington, Delaware.Google Scholar
Ernest Dichter Papers, Accession 2407.Google Scholar
Rubenstein Library, Duke University.Google Scholar
JWT Papers.Google Scholar
Published primary sources Google Scholar
First Advertising Convention in South Africa…1958. Johannesburg: Statistic Holdings (Pty) Ltd, 1958.Google Scholar
J. Walter Thompson Company. The South African Market, 1960. New York: J. Walter Thompson Company, c.1960.Google Scholar
Report of the Third Advertising Convention in South Africa…1960. Johannesburg: Statistic Holdings (Pty) Ltd, 1960.Google Scholar
Second Advertising Convention in South Africa…1959. Johannesburg: Statistic Holdings (Pty) Ltd, 1959.Google Scholar
South African Packaging and Sales Promotions—later Selling Age. Cape Town: SA Publishers, 1953–64.Google Scholar
The Approach to Bantu Press Advertising. Johannesburg: Bantu Press (Pty) Ltd, 1948.Google Scholar

Secondary sources

Beinart, W. Twentieth Century South Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Bryce, A. A Pictorial History of Advertising in South Africa. Cape Town: Don Nelson Publishers, 1990.Google Scholar
Burke, T. Lifebuoy Men and Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Burke, T. “‘Unexpected Subversions’: Modern Colonialism, Globalization and Commodity Culture.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, edited by Frank Trentmann, 467–484. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Burns, C. “Controlling Birth: Johannesburg, 1920–1960.” South African Historical Journal 50:1 (2004): 170–198.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J. L.. Of Revelation and Revolution. Vol 2, The Dialectics of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Curry-Machado, J. Global Histories, Imperial Commodities, Local Interactions. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Groot, J. “Metropolitan Desires and Colonial Connections: Reflections on Consumption and Empire.” In At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, edited by Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose, 166–190. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Dichter, E. Motivating Human Behaviour. New York: McGraw Hill, 1971.Google Scholar
Dichter, E. The Strategy of Desire. New York: Doubleday, 1960.Google Scholar
Dubow, S. Apartheid, 1948–1994. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Ginsburg, R. At Home with Apartheid: The Hidden Landscapes of Domestic Service in Johannesburg. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Hook, D. (Post)Apartheid Conditions. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Hyslop, J. “‘Undesirable Inhabitant of the Union’… ‘Supplying Liquor to Natives’: D. F. Malan and the Deportation of South Africa’s British and Irish Lumpen Proletarians, 1924–1933.” Kronos 40 (2014): 178–197.Google Scholar
Illouz, E. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Jones, T. “Averting White Male (Ab)normality: Psychiatric Representations and Treatment of ‘Homosexuality’ in 1960s South Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies 34:2 (2008): 397–410.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klausen, S. Race, Maternity and Birth Control in South Africa, 1910–1939. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.Google Scholar
Mager, A. K. Beer, Sociability and Masculinity in South Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Mbembe, A. “The Aesthetics of Superfluity.” In Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, edited by A. Mbembe A. and S. Nuttall, 37–67. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McClintock, A. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995.Google Scholar
Mchunu, E. Cheeky Native: A Practical Experience in Managerial and Leadership Excellence. Wandsbeck: Reach Publishers, 2010.Google Scholar
Modern Girl Around the World Research Group (Alys Eve Weinbaum, et al.). “The Modern Girl Around the World: Cosmetics Advertising and the Politics of Race and Style.” In The Modern Girl Around The World, edited by A. Weinbaum, Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, et al., 25–54. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Posel, D. “The Apartheid Project, 1948–1973.” In Cambridge History of South Africa. Vol. 2, 1885–1994, edited by R. Ross, A. Mager and B. Nasson, 319–368. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Posel, D. “Race and Common Sense.” African Studies Review 44:2 (2001): 87–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prestholdt, J. Domesticating the World: African Consumers and the Genealogies of Globalisation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Ramamurthy, A. Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Richards, T. Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Roos, N. “Education, Sex and Leisure: Ideology, Discipline and the Construction of Race among South African Servicemen during the Second World War.” Journal of Social History 44:3 (2011): 811–835.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ross, R., Pesa, I. and Hinfelaar, M.. eds The Objects of Life in Central Africa: The History of Consumption and Social Change, 1840–1980. Leiden: Brill, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Samuel, L. Freud on Madison Avenue: Motivation Research and Subliminal Advertising in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwarzkopf, S. and Gries, R.. “Ernest Dichter, Motivation Research and the ‘Century of the Consumer’.” In Ernest Dichter and Motivation Research: New Perspectives on the Making of Post-war Consumer Culture, edited by S. Schwarzkopf and R. Gries, 3–40. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seekings, J. and Nattrass, N.. Class, Race and Inequality in South Africa. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Shutt, A. Manners Make a Nation: Racial Etiquette in Southern Rhodesia, 1910–1963. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stoler, A. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Stoler, A. “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies.” In Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, edited by A. Stoler. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walvin, J.. Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Trade, 1600-1800. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar