In honour of the season, I offer yet another salt and pepper shaker set that consists of two male figures: Two Santas. And yet, of course, this makes no sense, no sense at all. There can only be one Santa Claus, surely. Other shakers, operating safely within the logic of a rigidly binary world, representContinue reading “Two Santas, and Some Guys Who Haven’t Been Good”
Category Archives: Racial Slurs
Chubby Chefs
Speaking of stereotypes (as I have doing in recent posts about salt-and-pepper depictions of Asiatics): did you notice how chubby all those chefs are, in the set I talked about in my last post? And indeed, not really very much to my surprise, other sets depicting non-Asiatic chefs are equally chubby–like this one: This timeContinue reading “Chubby Chefs”
Chinese Cooking Clones
As I suggested in an earlier post, alongside the exotic aliens, the other major branch of Asiatic stereotypes represented in my salt and pepper shaker collection consists of cooks. Here’s a pair: The standard stereotypical slanty eyes, so slanty that seem to be creepily without any whites, and this time accompanied by jolly rounded cheeksContinue reading “Chinese Cooking Clones”
Bluish Women
And speaking of exotic Orientalism, how about these? When I first looked at them, I thought that they were supposed to the sort of imaginary Africans who used to appear in the cartoons and comic books of my long-ago youth–the kind whose strange customs included various sorts of bodily mutilation, including the use of tooContinue reading “Bluish Women”
Non-Specific Exotica
Since I’ve been looking at orientalist stereotypes, evocations of the mysterious East, this seems like a good time to take a look at this set: Not Asiatic, but still evocative of orientalism and the mysterious other. I think these are maybe supposed to represent some kind of Africans–or Polynesians, or Indonesians or native South Americans,Continue reading “Non-Specific Exotica”
More Aesthetic Asians
Just to confirm how typically and conventionally stereotypical the set I described in my last post is, here’s a second set that repeats the same basic characteristics: slanty-eyed Asians of uncertain gender, both dressed in exotic pantsuits, both wearing strange round hats, both sitting on the floor, both engaged in the acts of sensitive aesthetes–thisContinue reading “More Aesthetic Asians”
Exotic and Smashable Fragility
I’ve previously written a number of posts about the racial stereotypes represented in my salt and pepper shaker collection: lazy Mexicans, but especially adorable Native North Americans and jolly overweight African Americans. This time, it’s the turn of the Asians. This set sums up one significant branch of the Asian world as it is depictedContinue reading “Exotic and Smashable Fragility”
Skin or Mask?
Here is another example of a set of shakers that exudes an intriguing ambiguity. It represents a clown, clearly, accompanied by a drum. Why a drum? I have no idea. Perhaps the drum originally came from a different shaker set–although the color tones do suggest these two do belong together. But that’s not the sourceContinue reading “Skin or Mask?”
Shaking
In my explorations of the scriptive actions of salt and pepper shakers over the past while, I’ve considered everything but the most obvious action they imply–the one implied by their name: shaking. Salt and pepper shakers are made to be shaken. Furthermore, as I think about it, I see that the act of shaking isContinue reading “Shaking”
Binaries as Scriptive Things
Before I head onwards towards a consideration of the novelty aspects of shaker sets as scriptive things, I think there’s one other aspect of salt-and-pepper sets generally that needs to be considered: their implications as a coupled pair. The question here is not just, why salt and pepper, but also, why salt and pepper together?Continue reading “Binaries as Scriptive Things”
Perry Nodelman 