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  • Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany by David Ciarlo
  • John Phillip Short
David Ciarlo. Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. xvi + 419 pp. ISBN 978-0-67405006-8, $54.00 (cloth).

David Ciarlo tells a strange and surprising story in this substantial, engrossing work, a story that entwines the desultory and deluded business of bourgeois colonialism with the rise of rationalized dynamism of capitalist advertising. This is at once a history of advertising, a visual history of Germany, and a cultural history of colonialism from the 1880s to 1914. Weird logics, tensions, and dead ends lie at the heart of it, as Ciarlo traces the robust dissemination of commercial images of black Africans––and ultimately the diffusion of a stable and hegemonic code of racial difference––in the face of broad popular indifference and hostility to empire, the ambivalence of colonialist elites toward mass commercial culture, and the plain failure of German colonies to produce much at all in the way of marketable goods. And so this history of advertising and empire is finally a history of race, of the way that the visual culture of capitalist market modernity becomes a frame or filter for the formation of racial identity in Germany. [End Page 397]

Ciarlo shows how the graphic, technological, and business history of modern German “advertising culture” paralleled the development of an iconography of race and empire and fused with it. As he puts it, not without qualification, “advertising’s empire was built, in part, on the advertising of empire” (4). This is not a heuristic intersection of his own devising, but rather a very particular catalyzing relationship, if one that appears elusive at moments in the book. Ciarlo links early commodity culture, commercial exhibitions of the 1880s and 90s, and live ethnographic shows to explain the birth of a new visual style. (He risks conflating the “colonial” with the foreign and exotic but proceeds with care––foregrounding the colonial only to, as we shall see, discount it.) Ethnographic shows and wax museums had a particular impact in their esthetics of spectacle and exoticism, even as advances in print technology made chromolithography cheaper, producing a flood of pictorial advertisements and trading cards. This was the context for the development of branding, of brand-name goods––especially among what Germans called “colonial wares” like chocolate, tea, and tobacco.

The link between empire and advertising is problematic because Germany’s unpopular, ignored colonies produced no goods, or few; ethnographica supplied a substitute, an ersatz bric-à-brac of empire. Aloof mandarin colonialists maintained a cool distance from commercial spectacle. Even Hanseatic merchants were lukewarm to the colonies. Empire was peripheral. And so we have a cultural history of business, or a history of business culture, at the confluence of advertising and empire, but empire in terms of ethnographic show business rather than capital and commodity. Ciarlo is perceptive in tracing this paradox, which energizes and complicates the book. But the question hangs, not altogether resolved: why should an unpopular and unsuccessful colonial project animate the vigorous, innovative new world of advertising?

The opportunity presents itself here to explore a sense of the unreal or irrational in the new mass market culture of Germany, reflecting something of the delusion that stamped the colonial movement itself. Certainly Ciarlo demonstrates, in a terrifically vivid portrayal of capitalist visual culture, the ways in which advertising developed according to its own internal logic. He describes a riot of reproduction: uncontainable flows of images continuously mutate and resurface in new configurations. Advertising is not only innovative but also derivative, imitative, and thieving, its visual conventions dictated by mechanical and cost imperatives. It follows a scavenger impulse, raiding ethnographic books, magazines, travelogue, anything. And it is transnational and exoticizing from its beginnings, borrowing heavily from abroad, from British models saturated by imperial imagery [End Page 398] and an American iconography of grotesque racial caricature. What emerges is a set of projected fantasies quite unmoored from colonialism in any specific, or specifically German, sense.

Most of the book traces a particular visual history of advertising, its systems of representation, its iconography and patterns, to illuminate...

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