Shopping for Pleasure, John Fiske Term Paper

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.. A very fine negro girl, about eight years of age" or "Wanted immediately, a Negro boy... not above 15 or under 12 years of age" and "To be sold one stout negro, young fellow, about 20 years of age" (Katyal; 1993).

These advertisements show a great deal about history. For example, not are these slaves only for sale in the Southern colonies. They were also in newspapers in the North.

For example, the woman who is described in this advertisement could only speak English. Therefore, she could not communicate easily with those New Yorkers, both white and black, whose primary language was Dutch. These advertisements also provided information about the clothing. They also shed light on the survival of Africanisms in dress and body adornment and proficiencies in occupations and language(s).

Consumption and the products that people want is highly dependent on the times. They are based on need. The shortage of workers in a rapidly growing new world as America encouraged the acceptance and proliferation of race-based slavery. During the colonial period, most of the enslaved people in New York came from West Africa or the West Indies. In colonial America overall, nearly half of the Africans taken to the Western Hemisphere came from the coasts of present-day Ghana, Togo, and Benin.

By the 1930s, according to Stewart Ewen, advertisements were becoming a deliberate and decisive component of consumer merchandising and a more general obsession of the consumer culture.

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It was no longer the product, but the advertisement of the product that was selling the item. This turn of events was not unnoticed by Egon Friedell, writing in Vienna in 1931. "There are no realities anymore," he lamented. "There is only apparatus.... Neither are there goods any more, but only advertisement. The most valuable article is the one most effectively lauded, the one that the most capital has gone to advertise. We call all this," he added, "Americanism."

By looking at these advertisements of the slaves, it appears that this concept of advertisements vs. reality of product started much earlier than the 1930s. It is well-known that slavery was a major part of the United States economy in the 1700s and 1800s. However, one has to ask how much more did such ads as the one above add to the amount of slaves that were bought by enticing individuals to buy this commodity?

Ewen, Stuart. All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture.

Basic Books.: New York. 1988.

Fiske, John. "Shopping for Pleasure: Malls, Power and Resistance," in Reading the Popular. 13-42: 1989

Kumar, Neal Katyal Men Who Own Women: A thirteenth Amendment Critique of Forced Prostitution Yale Library Journal….....

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