Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners

by Lynn M Thomas

Overview

For more than a century, skin lighteners have been a ubiquitous feature of global popular culture—embraced by consumers even as they were fiercely opposed by medical professionals, consumer health advocates, and antiracist thinkers and activists. In Beneath the Surface, Lynn M. Thomas constructs a transnational history of skin lighteners in South Africa and beyond. Analyzing a wide range of archival, popular culture, and oral history sources, Thomas traces the changing meanings of skin color from precolonial times to the postcolonial present. From indigenous skin-brightening practices and the rapid spread of lighteners in South African consumer culture during the 1940s and 1950s to the growth of a billion-dollar global lightener industry, Thomas shows how the use of skin lighteners and experiences of skin color have been shaped by slavery, colonialism, and segregation as well as by consumer capitalism, visual media, notions of beauty, and protest politics. In teasing out lighteners’ layered history, Thomas theorizes skin as a site for antiracist struggle and lighteners as a technology of visibility that both challenges and entrenches racial and gender hierarchies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478006428
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	01/10/2020
Series:	Theory in Forms
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Lynn M. Thomas is Professor of History at the University of Washington; coeditor of The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization, also published by Duke UniversityPress; and author of Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
A Layered History  1
1. Cosmetic Practices and Colonial Crucibles  22
2. Modern Girls and Racial Respectability  47
3. Local Manufacturing and Color Consciousness  75
4. Beauty Queens and Consumer Capitalism  98
5. Active Ingredients and Growing Criticism  150
6. Black Consciousness and Biomedical Opposition  190
Sedimented Meanings and Compounded Politics  221
Notes  237
Bibliography  293
Index

What People are Saying About This

Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa - Julie Livingston

“Beneath the Surface is nothing short of a tour de force. Lynn M. Thomas's ‘layered history’ does justice to the immensely difficult subject of skin lighteners. Carefully attending to the complex politics of race and color that are grounded in skin, Thomas at once provides a vibrant history of South Africa and a global history of commodity, beauty, and the body. This landmark study sets a new standard in the field.”

Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women - Noliwe M. Rooks

“Allowing for a comparative analysis over a period of time when the global relationships and meanings of skin color became tied to class, race, and racism, Beneath the Surface helps us understand the intense and long-standing interest whites and blacks have had in lightening the color of their skin despite the potential for severe health risks. There is simply no other book like it.”

Editorial Reviews

"Beneath the Surface makes a necessary contribution to [a] small pool of work on beauty and geography as Thomas' analysis integrates these subjects in considering the (trans)national politics and racial inequalities that uphold skin lightening.… This book would appeal to both undergraduate and graduate students as well as scholars interested in beauty, geopolitics, race, and colonialism."

Gender, Place & Culture - Meena Pyatt

"Lynn Thomas’s Beneath the Surface constructs a history of skin lighteners that is simultaneously rigorous in its historical evidence base and virtuosic in its lucid articulation of the technologies as they are mobilised in complex contexts in and beyond South Africa. . . . Its biopolitical argument is convincingly made and compelling."

BioSocieties - Vivette Garcia-Deister

Beneath the Surface is nothing short of a tour de force. Lynn M. Thomas's ‘layered history’ does justice to the immensely difficult subject of skin lighteners. Carefully attending to the complex politics of race and color that are grounded in skin, Thomas at once provides a vibrant history of South Africa and a global history of commodity, beauty, and the body. This landmark study sets a new standard in the field.

Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa - Julie Livingston

"Beneath the Surface is the most comprehensive book regarding skin lighteners available to date and it is both interesting and innovative.… The book has value as a postgraduate textbook relevant to the fields of history, social science, geopolitics, gender studies, geography, psychology, dermatology, and others. The layered, integrated history presented by Thomas in Beneath the Surface is indeed 'a landmark study' of skin colour and skin lighteners that interrogates every influencing factor from slavery and segregation to consumer capitalism, political protests and reinforced social inequities, and beyond."

South African Journal of Science - Caradee White

Allowing for a comparative analysis over a period of time when the global relationships and meanings of skin color became tied to class, race, and racism, Beneath the Surface helps us understand the intense and long-standing interest whites and blacks have had in lightening the color of their skin despite the potential for severe health risks. There is simply no other book like it.

Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women - Noliwe M. Rooks

"This is an impressive book that will surely be a classic for scholars interested in aesthetics, beauty politics, and gender. It is an especially welcome addition to the literature as it centers on African history from a transnational perspective. It also has much to offer those with specialization in the history of science, medicine, and technology."

Journal of African History - Oluwakemi M. Balogun

Thomas resourcefully assembles and interweaves sources connecting popular, business, medical and political culture. …. Beneath the Surface would be an engaging key text for students to study a history of race and gender within everyday global beauty cultures.

Metascience - Fabiola Creed