Engines and Acolytes of Consumption: Black Male Bodies, Advertising and the Laws of Thermodynamics

Abstract

An investigation into the historical development of Nike's award-winning advertising campaigns in the US reveals that, over the last decade or so, African-American athletes have become their almost exclusive focus. However, these ads have increasingly centered not on black personalities per se, but on the aesthetic, affective and visceral manifestations of skin, musculature and sweat. Black bodies in advertising are rarely to be seen at rest, unless in a state of exhaustion (from which the requisite product alone can provide relief). Consideration is therefore given to the potential connotations of cultural producers' repeated references to extreme physical exertion. Anson Rabinbach's trope of the `human motor' evokes modern science's concern with matters of energy preservation and entropy; here it is utilized to provide a fresh insight into the chronic contradictions between commercial cultural production on one hand, and the reality of contemporary cultural and social inequalities on the other.

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