Advertising Empire

Download or read book Advertising Empire written by David Ciarlo and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-03 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.