Commerce in Color: Race, Consumer Culture, and American Literature, 1893-1933

Synopsis

Commerce in Color explores the juncture of consumer culture and race by examining advertising, literary texts, mass culture, and public events in the United States from 1893 to 1933. James C. Davis takes up a remarkable range of subjects—including the crucial role publishers Boni and Liveright played in the marketing of Harlem Renaissance literature, Henry James’s critique of materialism in The American Scene, and the commodification of racialized popular culture in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man—as he argues that racial thinking was central to the emergence of U.S. consumerism and, conversely, that an emerging consumer culture was a key element in the development of racial thinking and the consolidation of racial identity in America. By urging a reassessment of the familiar rubrics of the “culture of consumption” and the “culture of segregation,” Dawson poses new and provocative questions about American culture and social history.

Copyright:

2007

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9780472026074

Publisher:

University of Michigan Press

Date of Addition:

01/31/12

Copyrighted By:

University of Michigan

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Business and Finance, Social Studies, Language Arts, Sociology

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.