TY - BOOK AU - Haidarali,Laila TI - Brown Beauty: Color, Sex, and Race from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II SN - 9781479875108 AV - E185.86 .H225 2019 U1 - 305.48896073 23 PY - 2018///] CY - New York, NY : PB - New York University Press, KW - African American women KW - Race identity KW - 20th century KW - Social conditions KW - Beauty, Personal KW - Social aspects KW - United States KW - HISTORY / United States / 20th Century KW - bisacsh KW - African American literature KW - African American womanhood KW - African American youth KW - Brown v Board of Education KW - Charles H Parrish KW - Charles S Johnson KW - Cold War politics KW - Dark Princess A Romance KW - Elise Johnson McDougald KW - Franklin E Frazier KW - Great Depression KW - Harlem Renaissance fiction KW - Harlem educator KW - New Negro woman KW - New Negro KW - The Crisis KW - W E B Du Bois KW - WWII KW - black beauty ideals KW - black middle class KW - brown skin beauty ideals KW - brown skin models KW - brown-skin mulatta KW - consumer advertising KW - consumption KW - cosmetics KW - gender politics KW - interwar years KW - literary journals KW - middle class KW - mixed race KW - new woman KW - print culture KW - race concept KW - racial liberals KW - transnational activism KW - urbanization and race KW - woman's era KW - women's poetry N1 - restricted access N2 - Examines how the media influenced ideas of race and beauty among African American women from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II. Between the Harlem Renaissance and the end of World War II, a complicated discourse emerged surrounding considerations of appearance of African American women and expressions of race, class, and status. Brown Beauty considers how the media created a beauty ideal for these women, emphasizing different representations and expressions of brown skin.Haidarali contends that the idea of brown as a "respectable shade" was carefully constructed through print and visual media in the interwar era. Throughout this period, brownness of skin came to be idealized as the real, representational, and respectable complexion of African American middle class women. Shades of brown became channels that facilitated discussions of race, class, and gender in a way that would develop lasting cultural effects for an ever-modernizing world. Building on an impressive range of visual and media sources-from newspapers, journals, magazines, and newsletters to commercial advertising-Haidarali locates a complex, and sometimes contradictory, set of cultural values at the core of representations of women, envisioned as "brown-skin." She explores how brownness affected socially-mobile New Negro women in the urban environment during the interwar years, showing how the majority of messages on brownness were directed at an aspirant middle-class. By tracing brown's changing meanings across this period, and showing how a visual language of brown grew into a dynamic racial shorthand used to denote modern African American womanhood, Brown Beauty demonstrates the myriad values and judgments, compromises and contradictions involved in the social evaluation of women. This book is an eye-opening account of the intense dynamics between racial identity and the influence mass media has on what, and who we consider beautiful UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781479865499 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9781479865499/original ER -