Racial Indigestion by Tompkins Kyla Wazana;

Author:Tompkins, Kyla Wazana;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2012-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

The Archive and the Exuberance of Racist Affect

It is almost impossible to know how many trade cards were produced, though one scholar estimates that across the period of their production—roughly the 1870s through 1906, when the Food and Drug Act was passed partly in repressive response to the false claims perpetrated in patent remedy advertising—there were approximately “30,000 basic stock images in trade cards alone, each typically varied with each reprinting, resulting in many multiples of that number [in circulation].”9 The term chromolitho-graphic refers to the printing process whereby several stone slabs, each using a different color, are used to produce a multicolored effect; previous printing processes had limited lithographs—and advertisements—to single-color images. Trade cards, small rectangular cards meant to be handed out in grocery stores or included in product packaging, were designed by a wide variety of manufacturers, advertising everything from seeds to soap, and were produced by printers in every region of the nation and then carried by “drummers,” or traveling salesmen. Indeed, trade cards were part of a general onslaught in advertising media in the period that also included posters, calendars, pamphlets, and show cards. Show cards, such as the one pictured in plate 5, were chromolithographic images mounted on boards and meant to be featured either on the sidewalk, on counters, or in store windows. Consumers often organized trade cards into albums, which were then passed down through families. Trade cards have survived in and out of albums, though albums were and are dismantled and sold individually. In the past 130 years of their existence trade cards, in other words, have been in constant motion across the country and between collectors.

As an early form of advertising, trade cards emerged in the late 1860s, when chromolithography became cheap and relatively easy to produce on both the small and large scale. Slipped into shopping bags at grocery stores across the country, included in product packaging, and, most importantly, featured at the 1876 and 1893 expositions,10 the brightly colored imagery paired, as Jackson Lears has written, commercial products with “fables of abundance,” including exotic and Orientalist imagery, scenes of idyllic domestic spaces, representations of mother goddesses, and other stereotypes of femininity, fecundity, and childhood.11

The social and emotional tensions that lie coiled in these images metonymize political agency in the conjoined tropes of commodity consumption, laughter, and ingestion. Their explosive energy, in part represented by the giddy use of color in the new printing technology and in part encapsulated in the action that these cards represent, demonstrates the aesthetic and political deployment of what Daphne Brooks, borrowing from Brecht, has called the “dissonantly enlightened performance” of “Afro-alienation.” What Brooks also calls “too-muchness” produces moments of spectacular visibility that exceed the advertisers’ intended and literal meanings.12 In the era of conspicuous consumption the “too-muchness” of the black and Asian bodies as represented in these trade cards is of key importance. The affective excess and semiotic overload of these images encode the use of disgust to facilitate and accompany the white bourgeois consumer’s disavowal and enjoyment of commodity pleasure.

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