This article engages questions of colonial intimacy in the context of the market – specifically, by white commercial sector in apartheid South Africa to lure black South Africans into burgeoning consumer markets. I focus on the 1960s, when the exercise in racial domination grew more ambitious and coercive, at the same time as buoyant economic growth efforts spurred consumerist desire. African consumers were largely invisible and incomprehensible to white businesspeople, who turned to advertisers and market researchers to bring ‘the African consumer’ to light. This was largely an epistemological challenge – the pursuit of new modes of knowledge about African people, and especially the material intimacies of their daily lives. This article examines this knowledge-making project, along with the anxieties, lapses and contradictions that inhered in it.

中文翻译：

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深入了解消费者的皮肤：种族隔离南非的种族、市场研究和消费主义项目

本文探讨了市场背景下的殖民亲密问题——特别是在种族隔离的南非，白人商业部门将南非黑人引诱到新兴的消费市场。我关注的是 1960 年代，当时种族统治变得更加雄心勃勃和更具强制性，与此同时，经济增长的积极努力刺激了消费主义的欲望。非洲消费者对白人商人来说基本上是隐形和不可理解的，他们求助于广告商和市场研究人员来揭露“非洲消费者”。这在很大程度上是一个认识论挑战——追求关于非洲人民的新知识模式，尤其是他们日常生活的物质亲密。本文考察了这个知识创造项目，以及它所固有的焦虑、失误和矛盾。