Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture

Description

Buy Black examines the role American Black women play in Black consumption in the US and worldwide, with a focus on their pivotal role in packaging Black feminine identity since the 1960s. Through an exploration of the dolls, princesses, and rags-to-riches stories that represent Black girlhood and womanhood in everything from haircare to Nicki Minaj's hip-hop, Aria S. Halliday spotlights how the products created by Black women have furthered Black women's position as the moral compass and arbiter of Black racial progress. Far-ranging and bold, Buy Black reveals what attitudes inform a contemporary Black sensibility based in representation and consumerism. It also traces the parameters of Black symbolic power, mapping the sites where intraracial ideals of blackness, womanhood, beauty, play, and sexuality meet and mix in consumer and popular culture. |List of Figures vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: The Making of Black Womanhood 1 1. Theorizing Black Women's Cultural Influence through Consumption 17 2. From Riots to Style: The History of Black Barbie 47 3. From Bootstraps to Glass Slippers: Black Women's Uplift in Disney's Princess Canon 79 4. A Black Barbie's Moment: Nicki Minaj and the Struggle for Cultural Dominance 111 Coda: The Stakes of Twenty-First-Century Black Creativity 143 Notes 153 Bibliography 165 Index 181| "A compelling analysis of the role American Black women have played in consumerism and popular culture, focusing on the 1960s to now. " —Business Insider "Important and accessible, Dr. Halliday's latest book expertly examines Black women as cultural producers and consumers and their subsequent, undeniable influence on popular culture. " —Ms. Magazine "Buy Black offers an important and well-argued consideration of the Black women cultural producers who, in an effort to subvert a misogynoiristic system, sometimes traffic in the very stereotypical practices they wish to upend. Halliday's concept of 'embodied objectification' helps to make clear our own investments in consumer capitalism and prompts us to be more circumspect about our participation as a means to some ultimately unsatisfying end."—Moya Bailey, author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women's Digital Resistance |Aria S. Halliday is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies and Program in African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky.