Laila Haidarali
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781479875108
- eISBN:
- 9781479865499
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479875108.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This book interrogates the multiple meanings of brown as reference to physical complexion in the representation of African American womanhood during the interwar years. It questions how and why color ...
More
This book interrogates the multiple meanings of brown as reference to physical complexion in the representation of African American womanhood during the interwar years. It questions how and why color in general and brownness in particular came to intimate race, class, gender, and sex identity as one prominent response to modernity and urbanization. This book shows that throughout the interwar years, diverse sets of African American women and men, all of whom can be defined as middle class within this constituency’s widely varying class membership, privileged brown complexions in their reworking of ideas, images, and expressions to identify the representative bodies of women as modern New Negro women.Less
This book interrogates the multiple meanings of brown as reference to physical complexion in the representation of African American womanhood during the interwar years. It questions how and why color in general and brownness in particular came to intimate race, class, gender, and sex identity as one prominent response to modernity and urbanization. This book shows that throughout the interwar years, diverse sets of African American women and men, all of whom can be defined as middle class within this constituency’s widely varying class membership, privileged brown complexions in their reworking of ideas, images, and expressions to identify the representative bodies of women as modern New Negro women.
Laila Haidarali
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781479875108
- eISBN:
- 9781479865499
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479875108.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter explores a selection of writings of thirteen poets who all published in important middle-class literary journals of the Harlem Renaissance. Their works appeared in the Crisis, Messenger, ...
More
This chapter explores a selection of writings of thirteen poets who all published in important middle-class literary journals of the Harlem Renaissance. Their works appeared in the Crisis, Messenger, and Opportunity, as well as in major anthologies of the era. Together, they present compelling collective expression of the frustrations, expectations, and desires of modern African American womanhood. Neither a collective movement nor an explicitly designed political expression, this range of women’s verse nonetheless showcases the contested gender politics of the era. Women’s poetry celebrated and critiqued the role of complexion in general, and brownness in particular, in determinations of women’s beauty, social worth, and sexual respectability.Less
This chapter explores a selection of writings of thirteen poets who all published in important middle-class literary journals of the Harlem Renaissance. Their works appeared in the Crisis, Messenger, and Opportunity, as well as in major anthologies of the era. Together, they present compelling collective expression of the frustrations, expectations, and desires of modern African American womanhood. Neither a collective movement nor an explicitly designed political expression, this range of women’s verse nonetheless showcases the contested gender politics of the era. Women’s poetry celebrated and critiqued the role of complexion in general, and brownness in particular, in determinations of women’s beauty, social worth, and sexual respectability.
Laila Haidarali
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781479875108
- eISBN:
- 9781479865499
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479875108.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
Between the Harlem Renaissance and the end of World War II, a discourse that privileged a representative ideal of brown beauty womanhood emerged as one expression of race, class, and women’s status ...
More
Between the Harlem Renaissance and the end of World War II, a discourse that privileged a representative ideal of brown beauty womanhood emerged as one expression of race, class, and women’s status in the modern nation. This discourse on brown beauty accrued great cultural currency across the interwar years as it appeared in diverse and multiple forms. Studying artwork and photography; commercial and consumer-oriented advertising; and literature, poetry, and sociological works, this book analyzes African American print culture with a central interest in women’s social history. It explores the diffuse ways that brownness impinged on socially mobile New Negro women in the urban environment during the interwar years and shows how the discourse was constructed as a self-regulating guide directed at an aspiring middle class. By tracing brown’s changing meanings and showing how a visual language of brown grew into a dynamic racial shorthand used to denote modern African American womanhood, Brown Beauty works to unpack a set of intertwined values and judgments, compromises and contradictions, adjustments and resistances, that were fused into social valuations of women.Less
Between the Harlem Renaissance and the end of World War II, a discourse that privileged a representative ideal of brown beauty womanhood emerged as one expression of race, class, and women’s status in the modern nation. This discourse on brown beauty accrued great cultural currency across the interwar years as it appeared in diverse and multiple forms. Studying artwork and photography; commercial and consumer-oriented advertising; and literature, poetry, and sociological works, this book analyzes African American print culture with a central interest in women’s social history. It explores the diffuse ways that brownness impinged on socially mobile New Negro women in the urban environment during the interwar years and shows how the discourse was constructed as a self-regulating guide directed at an aspiring middle class. By tracing brown’s changing meanings and showing how a visual language of brown grew into a dynamic racial shorthand used to denote modern African American womanhood, Brown Beauty works to unpack a set of intertwined values and judgments, compromises and contradictions, adjustments and resistances, that were fused into social valuations of women.
