Examples Of Commodity Racism

Commodity racism: Empire and the domestic world
In the middle ages, European had an ambiguous picture about Africa- a mysterious place, in a positive way. However, this picture gradually started to change during the British colonization. Africans were seen as barbarians, not-civilized people, monkey tribe and who were cursed in the bible. By the nineteenth century, when the European exploration and colonization of the African interior began in earnest, Africa was viewed as a historically abounded fetish land populated by cannibals. This is showed with example of spread of imperial images and themes in Britain through commodity advertising in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.
This bad image of black Africans to whites been created through various mediums from adventures novels to newspaper illustrations. In this list, racializing of advertisements( commodity racism) became one of the means. This advertising created a two way traffic between British middle class and African colonies to imagine a picture of both ends.through the commodity racism, 'the Victorian middle-class home became a space for the display of imperial spectacle and the reinvention of race, while the colonies - in particular Africa - became a theatre for exhibiting the Victorian cult of domesticity and the reinvention of gender'.
Also all the products were advertised with the white men exploiting darkest africans. The pears soap advertisement is a good example of that. Soap symbolized this 'racializing' of the domestic world and 'domestication' of the colonial world. Apparently the soap was advertized which had ability to wash black skin white of the industrial slums, while at the same time keeping the imperial body clean and pure in the racially polluted contact zones 'out there' in the Empire. In the process, however, the domestic labour of women was often silently