Kenny, Bridget. 2020. “Servicing ‘intimate publics’: Johannesburg and Baltimore department stores in the 1960s.” Safundi, The Journal of South African and American Studies 21(2): 115-139.
ABSTRACT
Based on archival and interview research in the US and South Africa, this paper examines two moments of public debate around access to the space of department stores in Johannesburg and in Baltimore in the 1960s. In Baltimore, African American students organized a sit-in protest at lunch counters and restaurants of major department stores to contest not being served. In Johannesburg, the National Union of Distributive Workers (NUDW), campaigned against job reservation in service and clerical work in stores in Johannesburg to argue for black workers’ access to employment. The paper contends that as “intimate publics,” department stores offer a site to compare the affective articulations of race, class, and gender in both places, which track differing political imaginaries at a moment when consumption was expanding and workforces were changing.
