Beneath the surface : a transnational history of skin lighteners / Lynn M. Thomas.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Cosmetic practices and colonial crucibles -- Modern girls and racial respectability -- Local manufacturing and color consciousness -- Beauty queens and consumer capitalism -- Active ingredients and growing criticism -- Black consciousness and biomedical opposition.

"BENEATH THE SURFACE explores the use of skin lighteners within South Africa, and across Africa and the diaspora. While skin color has been a marker of difference from the precolonial era to the post-Apartheid, postcolonial present, Lynn Thomas emphasizes the varied ways in which differences in skin color, tone, and texture became tied to regimes of value in white-dominant societies. However, Thomas does not dismiss skin lighteners as merely the adherence to an imposed valuation of white skin; instead, she tracks the remarkable development of social and political formations that shaped the appeal of a social object that lightened skin. Thomas builds a framework for assessing objects as part of an aesthetic and technological infrastructure that works through and with consumer capitalism to generate new forms of aesthetic beauty and establish skin tone as a marker for respectability and modernity transnationally. Through showcasing these multivocal desires for lighter skin, Thomas reintroduces the context of black entrepreneurship and consumerism within both national and international markets and creates space for understanding skin lightening as a productive site for both political and aesthetic struggle against a global racial order."--Provided by publisher.