ABSTRACT

How should toymakers represent a diverse society? Surprisingly, given the force of recent debates over race and nation and over migration, multiculturalism, and the postcolonial condition of Europe and North America, there is relatively little scholarship on how the toy industry engages with these particular themes. This article seeks to remedy this by taking a single toy company, Playmobil, as a case study for exploring the politics of racial and ethnic difference in its toys and marketing materials. It argues that the company, in an effort to diversify its products without alienating wary customers, has incorporated difference through specific strategies that elide and thereby reinforce an implicitly white, majoritarian norm, following a pattern of “banal multiculturalism” (Thomas 2011). By exploring these strategies in detail and by tying them to longstanding historical patterns, this study will suggest how companies can more critically challenge their own exclusionary practices of representation.

摘要

玩具制造商应该如何代表一个多元化的社会？令人惊讶的是，鉴于最近关于种族和民族以及移民、多元文化主义以及欧洲和北美的后殖民状况的辩论的力量，关于玩具行业如何参与这些特定主题的研究相对较少。本文试图通过以单一玩具公司 Playmobil 作为案例研究来探索其玩具和营销材料中的种族和民族差异政治来解决这个问题。它认为，该公司为了在不疏远谨慎的客户的情况下使其产品多样化，已通过特定策略纳入差异，从而消除并强化了隐含的白人多数主义规范，遵循“平庸的多元文化主义”模式（Thomas 2011）。