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

Commerce in Color examines consumer culture and race in the United States from 1893-1933 as they were manifested in advertising, literary texts, mass culture, and the public events of the period. James C. Davis argues that racial thinking was central to the emergence of U.S. consumerism and, conversely, that an emerging consumer culture was a key element in the development of racial thinking and the consolidation of racial identity in America. While there is an abundance of literature on both consumer culture and critical race theory, the intersection between the two has been neglected until now. Davis takes up a remarkable range of subjects, including the crucial role publishers Boni and Liveright played in the marketing of Harlem Renaissance literature, Henry James’s critique of materialism in
The American Scene , and the commodification of racialized popular culture in James Weldon Johnson’s
The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man . Both an influential literary study and an absorbing historical read,
Commerce in Color
proves that - in America - advertising, publicity, and the development of the modern economy cannot be understood apart from the question of race.