Advertising Diversity: Ad Agencies and the Creation of Asian American Consumers by Shalini Shankar (review)

Shalini Shankar’s first book, Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class, and Success in Silicon Valley (2008), dove into the lives of Northern California Silicon Valley South Asian teen culture at the turn of the century, exploring how South Asian youth, cognizant of mainstream model minority discourses and ethnic community norms, utilized a variety of cultural, linguistic, material, and consumptive practices to define themselves. In her second book, Advertising Diversity: Ad Agencies and the Creation of Asian American Consumers (2015), Shankar returns to questions of race, representation, and consumption through an in-depth account of the very processes that produce the advertisement—a mundane, pervasive, and often actively avoided visual presence of our lives. Shankar’s study brings us into the world of advertising—where “aspirational imagery” is created—to focus on the creation of racial and ethnic representation within the American advertising industry. Navigating through general market advertising and the niche subfield of multicultural advertising, Shankar turns her critical eye to the industry’s day-to-day work, foregrounding the processes that go into mass-mediated ideas of ethnoracial identity, gender, sexuality, nationality, and citizenship. In doing so, she interrogates how race and ethnicity are operationalized into “diversity” for corporate America. Shankar posits a conundrum that guides her research: if ad executives, clients, and media outlets do not want to be “racist,” how do they still make ads that are publicly called out as racist and “what would need to happen in corporate America to bring an antiracist agenda to the forefront” (7)?

To answer this question, she undertakes an ethnography of media production that allows her to not only examine representations but “also linkages between these and the identities of the advertising executives involved in their creation” (27). She deconstructs the idea of normal—one where subjective notions are rendered acceptable for all—and advances a process called “racial naturalization” to understand how Asian Americans are now positioned as model consumers (7). Shankar’s fieldwork included a seven-month stint (four continuous months) at Asian Ads (pseudonym), with additional interviews and observations, meetings, and creative conversations at various Asian American agencies. She complements this Asian American-specific fieldwork with interviews, limited participant observation, and attendance at industry events for general market advertising. Taken together, Shankar argues this selection of commercial media production and representation provides a “window into intersections of race, capitalism, and the products of its labor in the 21st century US” (9).

The book is structured to mirror the standard advertising process—moving through the pitch, account planning, and creative development of ads to account services, production, and, finally, audience testing. The book performs the advertising process for the reader, opening each chapter with a vignette concerning the particular process under discussion. By doing so, Shankar familiarizes the reader with the type of labor that advertising agencies engage in before adeptly interrogating such processes.

In the introductory chapter, “The Pitch,” Shankar offers her overarching theoretical framework, building on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of “assemblage” to contextualize multiple ideologies; investigate modes of production and circulation; and consider the linguistic, visual, material, affective, and sensory aspects of advertising development and production. Drawing on both Foucault (1987) and Grewal (2005), “biopolitics” is a recurring concept advanced to situate advertising’s penchant for classifying and organizing. These processes of classifying and organizing also make diasporas legible as consumer cultures and shape the very ways the US Census creates its categories. Arguing that “diversity” serves as a quali-sign that operates in tandem with capitalist endeavors, she focuses on the work of capitalist businesses—not the movement of capital itself—to understand how producing racial and ethnic meanings creates or reinforces a racialized capitalism.

Chapter 1 is titled “Account Planning,” which is ad-speak for gathering relevant market data. Shankar skillfully lays out the terrain of Asian American representation within the history of advertising, retracing and examining advertising’s involvement in naturalizing meanings of race for [End Page...