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

1. No Place of Race: Consumer Culture's Critical Tradition

1 No Place of Race consumer culture’s critical tradition For students of African American history and of race in the United States, the years between Plessy v. Ferguson and the Great Depression were pivotal in the renewal of racial thinking—the retrenchment of racism, the disenfranchisement of African Americans, and the consolidation of a whiteness that would include the massive “second wave” of European immigrants but few others. For scholars in contiguous ‹elds of cultural history, however, the primary signi‹cance of this period is that it marked the birth of a full-blown consumer society. To borrow the titles of several in›uential works on this transformation, the “incorporation of America” turned the United States into a “land of desire,” as the commercial “captains of consciousness” set about “advertising the American dream” and other “fables of abundance” in order to carve enduring “channels of desire.” Given the critical importance that the period from the 1890s to the 1930s held for both of these de‹ning transformations of U.S. culture, why has each one mattered so little in the scholarship about the other? Sustained attention to the articulations of race and consumer culture is more often found in scholarship on contemporary culture than in work addressing those earlier eras in which the patterns of their articulations were established. Historically, how have ideas about consumption and national citizenship been shaped by race thinking? In what ways has consumer culture animated race? As I stated in the introduction , understanding these articulations requires a kind of “recon‹gured genealogy” that has only recently begun to emerge. The title of this chapter alludes to the magisterial study No Place of Grace (1981), whose author, T. J. Jackson Lears, has arguably done more 19 than any other individual scholar to de‹ne and advance the recent study of U.S. consumer culture, not only through No Place of Grace and his more recent Fables of Abundance (1994), but also through coediting, with Richard Wightman Fox, two pivotal volumes of essays, The Culture of Consumption (1983) and The Power of Culture (1993). The scholarship in these books is representative of a broader tendency, a culturalist shift in the study of U.S. capitalism in recent years. Within this scholarship, culture has come to mean not just the superstructural expressions of an economic base, as more mechanistic accounts suggested, but a ‹eld of contestation in a hegemonic struggle to naturalize modern capitalism. Likewise, recent years have also witnessed a corresponding culturalist shift in the study of race in the United States—an interest in culture as a mediator of racial formation. Culture is here understood as a form of agency that is distinct from but works in concert with the law, science, and the state in maintaining and rede‹ning our ideas about race. These two notable developments have taken place concurrently but almost independently over the past twenty-‹ve years. As varied and extensive as the cultural history of consumer society has become, one is still hard-pressed to ‹nd scholarship in which race is central to the inquiry. If questions of race are posed at all, they are usually secondary to the questions of class or gender that have traditionally interested scholars of U.S. consumer culture. To begin to account for this tendency, we can look to the major strands of theoretical and historical scholarship that have informed the critical discourse. As importantly , we can in turn recognize the possibilities that are available for a sustained consideration of race. The examination of the critical tradition that I offer in this chapter begins with the in›uential analytical frameworks of Marx, Veblen, and the Frankfurt and Birmingham schools. I turn to the “native” tradition in U.S. scholarship, which has over the years adopted and adapted elements from each of the aforementioned frameworks. I then take up the less-known but robust critical conversation in African American scholarship that has coexisted alongside this “native” U.S. tradition, bearing its imprint in certain respects and departing in others, without having been much noted in turn by the mainstream. I end with several recent, promising interventions generated by critical race studies and the vigorous conversation on the concept of the “public sphere.” Though it is not an exhaustive survey of the 20 C0mmerce in Color relevant scholarship, this discussion suggests that a reconsideration of the place of race in consumer culture scholarship is...