Birdseed sent in this photo he took at a grocery store in Stockholm (which he posted at his blog as well):
The product is a new beverage, Fanta World Pineapple: Inspired by Jamaica. The two guys in the photo were hired to promote it at the little tiki-style counter. Johan says,
A couple of things leap out at me straight away:
* The continued (post-)colonial association of Jamaica with its plantation produce. The “inspiration” seems limited to the fact that pineapples are grown there for the consumption of the global North. (Canned goods like pineapples still have the charming moniker “kolonialvaror” (colonial merchandise) in Swedish retail jargon.)
* The ridiculous (verging on blackface) stereotypical representation of “Jamaicans” that the kids are suppsed to portray. It seems to have been done with extreme sloppiness – for instance, the Polynesian lava lava (a type of sarong) that they wear has absolutely nothing to do with Jamaica at all, but rather acts to represent an identity-less generalised tropics, dehumanised exotica.
The music was, of course, bad reggae.
I think Johan hits on an important issue here–how often the cultures of non-Westernized countries are mixed together into an undifferentiated image of exoticness–for instance, “tribal” fashion and “traditional” handicrafts often supposedly represent “Africa,” which is a meaningless category given the enormous diversity of cultures, languages, clothing styles, artistic motifs, and so on. But if you put some geometric designs and maybe an elephant on some cloth, it evokes “Africa.”
it’s also interesting that a certain hat shape and dreads have become such easily-identifiable shorthand symbols of Jamaica, and that Fanta is commodifying the idea of Jamaica to sell a product that has no reason to be more “inspired” by Jamaica than anywhere else pineapple is grown–Hawaii, Mexico, Costa Rica, etc. etc. etc.
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
I will go further. I think that being a “queen,” in the jail sense, is about being, both literally and figuratively, on the bottom. The imprisoned, gay men and, for that matter, women, are all on the bottom in this sense. (The corsage on the prison uniform is a hint that it’s not just about being gay, but about being female.) The problem with this ad, for me, is that it conflates sex and power. That the conflation can span so many different categories suggests that it resonates strongly. And that is what is disappointing to me. I would prefer to live in a world in which sex and power could be disentangled, as opposed to one that affirmed their entanglement. Let’s try to keep kids safe some other way, eh?
In this cartoon, titled “Plane Dumb” (1932), Van Beuren’s Tom and Jerry put on black face in order to disguise themselves in Africa. Putting on black face affects their intelligence as they go from being smart to dumb. Idoicy ensues. The “natives” come out at the very end:
A month or two ago I commented on the New York Times Upfront magazine for high school kids. I recently came across their latest, which features a cover story titled “What We Eat.” The story is really just an interesting collection of photographs of families from nations all over the world, but with each family sitting with all the food in their house.
However, although the title of the article inside the magazine is “What We Eat,” the title listed on the cover of the magazine is “What They Eat.” The picture selected for the cover is not one of the family photos, but is, instead, a photo apparently selected to elicit the maximum negative visceral response possible from American kids:
So the cover separates an “us” and a “them,” and shows the American high school students how gross and weird “they” are.
Check out the issue that preceded this one by just two or three weeks:
Here American high school students learn that people around the world with dark skin are violent, dirty, and poorly dressed.
No wonder American kids grow up to be American adults whose voting habits reflect the view that American foreign policy should be paternalistic.
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FROM THE ARCHIVES:
April last year: This fascinating Italian anti-immigrant poster suggests that, if immigration to Italy is allowed, immigrants will persecute the native Italians like U.S. colonizers did American Indians. It’s a pretty amazing tactic.
NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS (bottom of post may not be safe for work!):
Total Drek revised an xkcd cartoon on the difference between causation and correlation. So we added it to our original post.
Related to discomfort with women’s genitalia, Taylor D. sent in a link to even more vintage ads for Lysol as a douche, which we added to this post.
We added a vintage ad to our sex sells post. This one tells men that if they don’t buy Firestone tires, they won’t get laid. Women? Well I guess they don’t drive.
Also in sex sells, we updated our post on the sexualization of food, this time with a Max Factor ad and a not-to-be-missed Hardee’s commercial featuring Padma Lakshmi having quite the sensual experience with a bacon burger (scroll all the way to the bottom).
We also added another image to our post with examples of sex as “scoring.”
Now to sperm: We added three more images affirming the idea that we were all once a mighty sperm (eggs, apparently, just add nutrition, if that) to this post on the weird ways in which sperm are socially constructed. In one of them, a condom ad suggests that one condom could have prevented the holocaust by dressing a sperm up as Hitler. Another example dates back to the beginning of the idea in 1694.
We added images of sculptures that comically/stereotypically (depending on your point of view) represent European countries to this post about stereotyping nationalities. The installation was supposedly by 27 different artists, but it turns out to be a hoax; all of them were created by a single Czech artist.
And visit this post to see our newest example of using the notion of the “savage” to sell in the 1950s.
Miguel sent us an image of a “White” Obama, which we added to our post that asks “What do Black and White look like, anyway?”
Philip D. sent us a set of Crown Royal ads that reportedly target a “general” and a specifically African American audience, respectively, which we added to our post about marketing products to different groups.
On gender:
Elizabeth M. sent us a link to fashion designer Nina Ricci’s new line of shoes. They’re high high HIGH heels! We added it to some other real hobblers here.
Women cannot be counted on to hold it together in the face of low calorie sweets… or at least that’s what another commercial tells us.
The Daily Show spoofed the obsession with Michelle Obama’s clothes. Andrea G. sent in the link and we added it to our collection of examples of this obsession. We also added a picture of the cover of a new book: Michelle Style: Celebrating the First Lady of Fashion.
And, finally, does a month go by where we don’t update our BOOBS! post? Rarely. This time, though, we’ve got something special: Jezebel offered us a photo essay of a boob shaped milk cartoon, from fridge to trashcan. Visit our updated post here (scroll to the bottom) and enjoy this teaser:
Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight put up an image that illustrates the findings of a recent survey by George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication.This inverted pyramid shows the percent of those polled who said they think global warming will hurt each group “a great deal” or “a moderate amount”:
So as we see, the closer the question got to the person answering the survey, the less severe they thought the impacts of global warming were likely to be. Silver says,
These beliefs are not necessarily irrational. Climate change probably will have more impact on the developing world than the developed one, and it almost certainly will have more impact on our children than it does on ourselves.
But if individuals don’t perceive climate change to really have negative consequences for them or their families, they may not support climate change policies if they fear those policies will hurt jobs/business in the short-term, since they may be more likely to see the economic impacts as personally problematic.
UPDATE: An anonymous commenter pointed out that the 538 pyramid is a bit misleading. Brad Johnson at Wonk Room created a more representative one:
This post is dedicated to Frankie Manning. Frankie died this morning of complications related to pneumonia He was one month shy of his 95th birthday. I will really miss him. Frankie is a lindy hop legend. He choreographed the clip below and is the dancer in the overalls.
In the 1980s, there was a lindy hop revival. Lindy hop is a partner dance invented by African American youth in Harlem dancing to swing music in the early 1930s. Named after the “hopping” of the Atlantic by Charles Lindbergh Jr., it became wildly popular in the 1930s and ‘40s, traveling from the East to the West Coast and from black to white youth. Since its resurgence, Lindy Hoppers have enjoyed a national scene with websites, workshops, competitions, and city-wide social events that draw national and international crowds.
Though lindy hop was invented by African Americans, lindy hoppers today are primarily white. These contemporary dancers look to old movie clips of famous black dancers as inspiration. And this is where things get interesting: The old clips feature profoundly talented black dancers, but the context in which they are dancing is important. Professional black musicians, choreographers, and dancers had to make the same concessions that other black entertainers at the time made. That is, they were required to capitulate to white producers and directors who presented black people to white audiences. These movies portrayed black people in ways that white people were comfortable with: blacks were musical, entertaining, athletic (even animalistic), outrageous (even wild), not-so-smart, happy-go-lucky, etc.
So what we see in the old clips that contemporary lindy hoppers idolize is not a pure manifestation of lindy hop, but a manifestation of the dance infused by racism. While lindy hoppers today look at those old clips with nothing short of reverance, they are mostly naive to the fact that the dancing they are emulating was a product made to confirm white people’s beliefs about black people. Let’s look at how this plays out:
This clip, from the movie Hellzapoppin’ (1941) is perhaps the most inspirational clip in the contemporary lindy hopper’s arsenal:
By the way, the dancers are in “service” outfits because of the way lindy hop scenes featuring black dancers were included in movies. Typically they would have no relationship to the plot; they would occur out of nowhere and then disappear. This was so that the movie studios could edit out the scene when the movie was going to be shown to those white audiences that were hostile to seeing any positive representation of black people at all. If you want to see how the scene above emerged (black “help” suddenly discovering musical instruments and spontaneously congregating), you can watch the extended clip here.
The clip features a dance troop called Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers. You can see other famous dance segments in Boy! What A Girl! and Day At The Races.
The clip below, from the Ultimate Lindy Hop Showdown (2006), reveals how powerfully contemporary lindy hoppers have been influenced by clips like the ones above. Watch for how the styling, moves, and trick reflects the clips above:
Another good example can be found here (but the angle, audio, and visual quality are not very good).
So we have a set of (mostly) white dancers who naively and wholeheartedly emulate a set of black dancers whose performances, now 70 to 80 years old, were produced for mostly white audiences and adjusted according to the racial ethos of the time. On the one hand, it’s neat that the dance is still alive; it’s wonderful to see it embodied, and with so much enthusiasm, so many years later. And certainly no ill will can be fairly attributed to today’s dancers. On the other hand, it’s troubling that the dance was appropriated then (for white audiences) and that it is that appropriation that lives on (for mostly white dancers). Then again, without those dancers, there would likely be no revival at all. And without those clips, however imperfect, the dance might have remained in obscurity, lost with the bodies of the original dancers.
As a white lindy hopper myself, for over ten years now, who desperately loves this dance, I find this to be a deep conundrum.
I don’t know what Frankie would have had to say about this critique. But I do know that he loved lindy hop to his last days and he was grateful for the revival. Here he is dancing with Dawn Hampton, another legend of lindy hop, at the age of 94:
I’lll miss you, Frankie. And I’ll keep on dancing, embodying, with ambivalence, all the great contradictions of the dance and the history of this country.
UPDATE:A couple commenters asked how, exactly, the dance was changed in order to appeal to white audiences. This is actually really difficult to say, since few films of social dancing (black dancers dancing only for other black dancers) exist. But we have some theories. Evan, in the comments, had this suggestion:
For white audiences of the time, Jazz was Hot Black jungle music – Black people were sex crazy hedonists, and you can see it in the moves, the exaggerated body undulation. the speed. the sweat. the rhythmical drum.
It was like watching a tribe around a fire.
I’m with Evan. I’d like to also add that, as a person with a trained eye for lindy hop, I see two things in those clips:
(1) I see incredibly effective technique. Unbelievable strength and precision. It’s fantastic. (By the way, Frankie explained that, by the time they got to the take you see in the Hellzapoppin’ clip, they’d performed that routine more than 20 times in a row… they were amazing athletes.)
(2) But I also see, layered onto and facilitated by that technique, an effort to make the dance appear more out-of-control than it is. They are wild-ing the dance.
At least, that’s how it looks to me.
More than that, though. As a dancer who has also been inspired by those clips, I know how to do that. I know how to exaggerate the out-of-control look. I won’t go into the technical details (I did, and then deleted!), but it’s do-able. And it’s not that it’s not cool… adding the drama is fun and exciting to watch… but there’s a historical reason why lindy hop has that dimension and that is worth thinking about.
I presume, though I have never seen any evidence for this, that we don’t all get the same email forwards. For instance, I never received this forward… but Steve W. did:
Text:
Did You Know This About Leather Dresses?
Do you know that when a woman wears a leather dress, a man’s heart bests quicker, his throat gets dry, he gets weak in the knees, and he begins to think irrationally???
Ever wonder why?
It’s because she smells like a new golf bag!
Why don’t I typically receive such forwards? To suggest that it has something to do with my sex, which was my first guess, is probably too simple of an explanation. I suspect it also has something to do with my class, politics, and occupation.
What kind of forwards do you (not) get? Do you think you might be surprised at what other people receive in their inbox?
Do you selectively forward certain sentiments to some people and not others? Do certain sentiments come from some people in your social network and not others?
What does the big wide world of forwarding look like? Who forwards what to who? Or, what part of the forwarding-whole is largely invisible to you?
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This post is dedicated to 