Black Beauty Culture Matters: Race, Gender, and Consumer Capitalism

Abstract

Black Beauty Culture Matters: Race, Gender, and Consumer Capitalism Ingrid Banks Laila Haidarali. Brown Beauty: Color, Sex, and Race from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II. New York: New York University Press, 2018. 368 pp. ISBN 9781479875108 (cl); 9781479802081 (pb); 9781479838370 (ebook). Lynn M. Thomas. Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 368 pp. ISBN 9781478005384 (cl); 9781478006428 (pb). Despite decades of scholarship on beauty culture, the terrain remains fertile for studies that add to our understanding of how women’s bodies bear messages of cultural and political import. Two recent publications stand as exemplary contributions that make compelling cases for scholars of race to look to beauty. Beauty offers an even greater understanding of how societies come to comprehend race and ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, culture, and much more. Through their respective texts on beauty culture, Laila Haidarali and Lynn M. Thomas provide beautifully rigorous examples of how notions of race and cultural practices are inherently unstable. In Brown Beauty: Color, Sex, and Race from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II, Laila Haidarali explores beauty through the lens of “New Negro” womanhood during the interwar years and examines how middle-class African Americans embraced an intra-racial middle ground of “brown” skin tones as a signifier of racial pride.1 In Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners, Lynn M. Thomas uses South Africa as the foundation of a transnational study of skin lighteners by historicizing how such practices emerged and endure, albeit in often contradictory ways. Both texts remarkably illustrate beauty’s reach and influence within African diasporic contexts. Both projects focus on consumerism, capitalism, and the shifting meaning of racialized categories, using beauty as a magnificent window. Highlighting the Harlem Renaissance, Haidarali argues that middle-class African Americans privileged brown complexions in constructing “New Negro” womanhood. Centering brown as a marker of racial identity and beauty, African Americans portrayed the modern woman as an urban educated worker, while also presenting brown skin tones as a source of racial pride. Though the Black Power era of the mid-to-late 1960s in the United States is often viewed as the moment African Americans embraced a “Black is Beautiful” politic and aesthetic, Haidarali argues that “New Negroes” were [End Page 115] championing race pride by embracing brownness as representative of a diverse Blackness that challenged the supremacy of lighter skin tones and denigration of darker hues. However, “modern” women, or those coming of age in the early twentieth century, rejected this framing of New Negro womanhood, suggesting it was too connected to earlier Victorian-era tenets of domesticity and respectability. For early twentieth-century modern women, there was nothing “new” about New Negro womanhood as it smacked of the “old” view of African American womanhood. Instead, modern African American women embraced brownness as a means to express gendered, sexualized, and political ideals that ran counter to what they viewed as outdated sexist constructions of New Negro womanhood that privileged middle class respectability. Thus, a modern or transgressive view of new womanhood emerged during the interwar years. Haidarali illustrates how brown skin inspired these conflicting beliefs about African American womanhood, with what was viewed as “archaic” and “modern” existing alongside each other. Haidarali adeptly shows how the language of brownness flooded print culture, visual and literary, during the Harlem Renaissance. Winold Reiss’s New Negro paintings documented brown skin, most famously in the Brown Madonna (circa 1925). Poetry centered the experiences of “brown girls.” Advertisements of dolls and beauty preparations such as hair and skin products appropriated “brown” in order to appeal to African American women. Periodicals such as The Crisis, the official publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), highlighted brown-skinned women on covers. About W. E. B. Du Bois’s novel Browning the Dark Princess, Haidarali notes: “As narrative device and racial metaphor, brownness exposes multiple points of entry to interpret its meaning in relation both to Du Bois’s creative expression and the broader intellectual, political, and social climates abounding in 1920s America” (223). The novel was Du Bois’s attempt to center brownness within a transnational context. Haidarali...