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Race and Retail

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Race and Retail

Consumption across the Color Line

Contributions by Mia Bay, Ann Fabian, Naa Oyo A. Kwate, Geraldo L. Cadava, Traci Parker, Bridget Kenny, John W. Heaton, Ellen D. Wu, Neiset Bayouth, Johana Londoño, Erualdo R. González, Stacey A. Sutton, Melissa L. Cooper, Siobhan Carter-David, Jerome D. Williams, Geraldine Rosa Henderson, Sophia R. Evett, Anne-Marie G. Hakstian, Azure B. Thompson and Sharese N. Porter

Series: Rutgers Studies on Race and Ethnicity

Published by: Rutgers University Press

Subjects:American Studies, Race and Ethnic Studies

324 Pages, 6.0 x 9.0 in, 11 photographs, 2 maps, 11 tab

Paperback
9780813571706
Published: August 4, 2015

EPUB
9780813575353
Published: August 4, 2015

Hardcover
9780813571713
Published: August 4, 2015

PDF
9780813571720
Published: August 4, 2015

Description
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Race has long shaped shopping experiences for many Americans. Retail exchanges and establishments have made headlines as flashpoints for conflict not only between blacks and whites, but also between whites, Mexicans, Asian Americans, and a wide variety of other ethnic groups, who have at times found themselves unwelcome at white-owned businesses.

Race and Retail documents the extent to which retail establishments, both past and present, have often catered to specific ethnic and racial groups. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the original essays collected here explore selling and buying practices of nonwhite populations around the world and the barriers that shape these habits, such as racial discrimination, food deserts, and gentrification. The contributors highlight more contemporary issues by raising questions about how race informs business owners’ ideas about consumer demand, resulting in substandard quality and higher prices for minorities than in predominantly white neighborhoods. In a wide-ranging exploration of the subject, they also address revitalization and gentrification in South Korean and Latino neighborhoods in California, Arab and Turkish coffeehouses and hookah lounges in South Paterson, New Jersey, and tourist capoeira consumption in Brazil.

Race and Retail illuminates the complex play of forces at work in racialized retail markets and the everyday impact of those forces on minority consumers. The essays demonstrate how past practice remains in force in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Contents

Introduction

Part I: Race, Place and Retail Spaces

Chapter 1: Traveling Black /Buying Black: Retail and Roadside Accommodations during the Segregation Era

Chapter 2: Retail Messages in the Ghetto Belt

Chapter 3: The Other Migrants: Mexican Shoppers in American Borderlands

Chapter 4: Southern Retail Campaigns and the Struggle for Black Economic Freedom in the 1950s and 1960s

Chapter 5: Servicing a Racial Regime: Gender, Race and the Public Space of Department Stores in Baltimore, Maryland, and Johannesburg, South Africa, 1940-1970

Part II: Race, Retail and Communities

Chapter 6: Athabascan Village Stores: Subsistence Shopping in Interior Alaska in the 1940s

Chapter 7: Deghettozing Chinatown: Race and Space in Postwar America

Chapter 8: Marketing Identity, Negotiating Boundaries: Ethnic Entrepreneurship in Paterson, New Jersey’s Narghile Lounges

Chapter 9: The Changing Politics of Latino Consumption: Debates in Downtown Santa Ana’s New Urbanist and Creative City Revitalization

Chapter 10: The Spatial Politics of Black Business Closure in Central Brooklyn

Part III: The Inner Landscapes of Racialized Consumption

Chapter 11: Selling Voodoo in Migration Metropolises

Chapter 12: A Fantasy in Fashion: Luxury Dressing and African American Lifestyle Magazines in the 1980s

Chapter 13: Racial Discrimination in Retail Settings: A Liberation Psychology Perspective

Chapter 14: Does the Retail Environment Affect Mental Health?: Satisfaction with Neighborhood Retail and Social Well Being among African Americans in New York City

Notes on Contributors

MIA BAY is a professor of history and co-director of the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University. She is the author of The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People 1830–1925.

ANN FABIAN is a distinguished professor of history and co-director of the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University. She is the author of The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead.

"Providing effective analyses of how ethnicity affects people's experience as consumers as well as citizens, this cohesive collection will have a broad audience … Highly recommended."
~CHOICE

"A fine resource for scholars and students alike, one that moves the field of consumer culture studies forward by enriching what we know and suggesting how much research - and much advocacy - still lie ahead."
~The Journal of American History

"Definitively establishes the importance of retail as a site where racial and ethnic identities are formed, negotiated, policed, or contested … Race and Retail is an excellent collection, one whose rich content amply rewards careful reading."
~Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

"This is the most important book on race and consumerism in many years."
~Kathy M. Newman, author of Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935-1947

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Race and Retail

Consumption across the Color Line

Race and Retail

Consumption across the Color Line

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