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bell hooks’ “Eating the Other” as a Critical Advertising Framework

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Postcolonial Marketing Communication

Abstract

This chapter proposes the late bell hooks’ essay “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance” (2012) as an exemplar for understanding the contradictions in representation in multicultural, postcolonial, and globalized advertising. Her argument and framework for analysis highlight the mix of seemingly affirmative portrayals—but ultimately with essentialist and stigmatizing undertones—of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) representation and postcolonial portrayals of other cultures, including those in the Global South, produced by advertising in the West. The chapter will explicate hooks’ argument and its explanatory power and discuss its relevance for critical advertising studies and ways to use the essay for critical and postcolonial advertising studies, including a review of how previous research has employed the perspective to understand representation in advertising. It will then apply her framework to two case studies: a 2013 print campaign for Turkish Airlines that offered images of different cultures, and a 2021 digital video and in-store commercial by the Canadian branch of the French beauty product brand Sephora that attempted to integrate—or perhaps appropriate—National Indigenous History Month.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Skytrax World Airlines Awards are listed as follows: https://www.worldairlineawards.com/worlds-top-100-airlines-2021/.

  2. 2.

    The “Far East” variation of this campaign is the only one that is phrased differently in the upper tagline. It is worded “Be part of…” instead of “Meet with…” This may indicate a separation of Turkey from what is connoted as “the Far East”; that is, Turkish travelers are already a part of the rest of the world when they “meet,” but they can choose to be a “part of” the “Far East” when they travel there. For an analysis of the “Far East” campaign version as an example of international advertising strategies, see Aydoğan [2].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Film Production and Media Studies, Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA

    Matthew P. McAllister

  2. Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA

    Sydney L. Forde & Yasemin Beykont

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  1. Matthew P. McAllister
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  2. Sydney L. Forde
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Correspondence to Matthew P. McAllister .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Alliance School of Business, Alliance University, Bangalore, Karnataka, India

    Arindam Das

  2. Marketing, Xavier School of Management, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, India

    Himadri Roy Chaudhuri

  3. Marketing, Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Lanarkshire, UK

    Ozlem Sandikci Turkdogan

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McAllister, M.P., Forde, S.L., Beykont, Y. (2024). bell hooks’ “Eating the Other” as a Critical Advertising Framework. In: Das, A., Chaudhuri, H.R., Turkdogan, O.S. (eds) Postcolonial Marketing Communication. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-0285-5_3

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