Buy Black

How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture

Aria S. Halliday

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780252086359
  9780252044274
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252053269
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Making of Black Womanhood
• 1. Theorizing Black Women’s Cultural Influence through Consumption
• 2. From Riots to Style: The History of Black Barbie
• 3. From Bootstraps to Glass Slippers: Black Women’s Uplift in Disney’s Princess Canon
• 4. A Black Barbie’s Moment: Nicki Minaj and the Struggle for Cultural Dominance
• Coda: The Stakes of Twenty-First-Century Black Creativity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index