This assignment asks you to examine advertisements that use pictures of people from other countries and cultures to sell a product. The goal is to become aware of the kinds of images that make up our picture of the rest of the world, and to question them.

In Professor Wilk's lectures, and in your discussion sections, you have learned that 'globalization' has made the world seem 'smaller.' We get the impression that people all over the world, speaking different languages, and practicing different cultures, are all coming closer and closer to understanding each other, and are becoming the same. We are told that people may speak a different language, but all of us are 'global' citizens. All the world drinks Coke® even if they wear red robes and carry spears.

But we are also exposed to pictures of people from other places that emphasize how different they are from "us." Advertisements show us Africans wearing masks and Hawaiian women in grass skirts. Every advertisement with images of foreign people stereotypes those people in some way, giving us an idealized image of what they are like. There is also an unspoken, subtle relationship between the American reader and the people shown in the ad. These relationships tell us who is powerful and who is weak, who is making choices and who is following orders, who is important and who is insignificant.

Instructions:

This assignment asks you to find some advertisements that show people from outside the United States and Europe. We want to you look at the advertisements in a new way, and to think about what they say about how other people are different from "us," why advertisers are using pictures of other people in this way, and what this says about "us."

The first part of this assignment is finding your research material. You must find two different advertisements that show either:

1. the same group of non-western people at two different times, or

2. two different groups of non-western people at the same time

Go to the library, and look for the bound back issues of mainstream magazines like Life, Time, and the Saturday Evening Post. You can also look in fashion, cooking, outdoors, homemaking, sports, automotive, and other specialty magazines. Look, for example, for an advertisement showing Japanese people during the last few years, and then look for another advertisement showing Russians from an issue of about the same date, or look in magazines from 40 or 50 years ago to find another ad featuring Japanese. You can contrast two different groups of people as depicted in ads from 50 years ago, if you wish.

Now follow these steps in your write-up:

1. Make copies of both of your advertisements to include in the assignment when you turn it in.

Then examine the ads and tell us

2. How are the foreign people in the ads different from the North American audience that the advertisement addresses? What makes them appear different? Pay attention to dress, posture, and what they are doing. What kinds of surroundings are they in? What stereotypes of other groups does the ad draw upon?

3. What do you learn from comparing these two ads? Have stereotypes changed over time? Why do advertisers pick different kinds of foreign people to express different ideas? How are the images of the group you have chosen similar or different? Are the relationships portrayed between people in this ad equal? Friendly? Who is in a position of power?

4. What do the ads tell us about the audience they are aimed at? To whom is the product being targeted? What do they imply about Americans in general?

5. Finally, tell us what these ads say about globalization, and the way Americans think about themselves and other people.

A lot of this assignment depends on reading the instructions carefully and picking the right ads to make a particular point. Spend a good deal of time looking and picking ads, and the rest of the write-up will be much easier.

PROOFREAD your papers before you hand them in. Make sure you have an introduction AND a conclusion. Put your AI's name on the first page of your paper. Consult the course website for guidelines about paper writing, and contact your AI for further assistance. As usual, we expect papers that are carefully written, grammatically correct, and interesting to read. Good luck!