Consumption

Under the umbrella of material culture, consumption holds possibilities in terms of the postcards: ‘Not only in today's society, but at least as far back as the Elizabethan Age,' argues Adrienne Hood, ‘people were involved in making and acquiring consumer goods. It is critical, therefore, to try to understand the meaning invested in material possessions as part of the acts of production and consumption.'14 Culture and consumption are rooted in dynamic historical process. Thus, there is significant meaning in consumer goods that can transcend monetary value, consisting ‘largely in their ability to carry and communicate cultural meaning.'15

Ann Smart Martin points out that many scholars seek to understand consumerism by thinking about, ‘ what broad structural changes either produced or enabled consumer demand.'Martin draws attention to the period between 1880 and 1930 as being of particular interest to historians in this regard. Particularly in Western society, this approach brings our attention to cultural cores and peripheries , markets and hinterlands and the complex changes through which face-to-face exchange evolved into mediated exchange.'16

Source: Ed. by James Allen, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America ( Santa Fe : Twin Palms Publishers, 2000) and http://www.musarium.com/withoutsanctuary/main.html

Grace Elizabeth Hale suggest that the images above are rooted in modernity. By 1890, the South became incorporated into the expanding national market. As railways and eventually highways transformed the Southern landscapes of old, billboards and neon characterized the new visual environment. Although lynchings declined after their peak in the early 1890s, they increasingly became mass cheap spectacle. Modern technologies allowed them to become standardized, photographed and commodified. Displays of souvenir body parts and picture postcards from lynchings were especially popular. Lynchings were about making and maintaining racial difference; they denoted ‘the spread of consumption as a white privilege.' Thus, trains, cameras, phones and newspapers shaped a common Southern narrative of white superiority over emancipated African Americans. In the modern age, Hale argues, it was not necessary for whites to be present at a spectacle lynching: ‘Representations of lynchings, multiplying and increasing their power with the spread of consumer culture, made the line between individual and collective experience much more permeable than the line between the races.'17

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