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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
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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 

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Footnotes

*

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

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