Thomas, Lynn M. (Author)
For more than a century, skin lighteners have been a ubiquitous feature of global popular culture—embraced by consumers even as they were fiercely opposed by medical professionals, consumer health advocates, and antiracist thinkers and activists. In Beneath the Surface, Lynn M. Thomas constructs a transnational history of skin lighteners in South Africa and beyond. Analyzing a wide range of archival, popular culture, and oral history sources, Thomas traces the changing meanings of skin color from precolonial times to the postcolonial present. From indigenous skin-brightening practices and the rapid spread of lighteners in South African consumer culture during the 1940s and 1950s to the growth of a billion-dollar global lightener industry, Thomas shows how the use of skin lighteners and experiences of skin color have been shaped by slavery, colonialism, and segregation as well as by consumer capitalism, visual media, notions of beauty, and protest politics. In teasing out lighteners’ layered history, Thomas theorizes skin as a site for antiracist struggle and lighteners as a technology of visibility that both challenges and entrenches racial and gender hierarchies.
...MoreMultimedia Object Dr. Elisa Prosperetti; Thomas, Lynn M. (2020) Lynn M. Thomas, “Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners” (Duke UP, 2020).
Multimedia Object
Dr. Elisa Prosperetti;
Thomas, Lynn M.;
(2020)
Lynn M. Thomas, “Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners” (Duke UP, 2020)
(/isis/citation/CBB507391314/)
Book
Campbell, Gwyn;
Stanziani, Alessando;
(2013)
Bonded Labour and Debt in the Indian Ocean World
(/isis/citation/CBB001421572/)
Book
Ostherr, Kirsten;
(2013)
Medical Visions: Producing the Patient through Film, Television, and Imaging Technologies
(/isis/citation/CBB001212070/)
Book
Cyd Cipolla hD;
Kristina Gupta hD;
David A. Rubin hD;
Angela Willey hD;
(2017)
Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader
(/isis/citation/CBB839395081/)
Thesis
Fabio Terence Palmi Zoia;
(2015)
Sanitizing South Africa: Race, Racism and Germs in the Making of the Apartheid State, 1880-1980
(/isis/citation/CBB935949008/)
Book
Andrew M. Busch;
(2017)
City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas
(/isis/citation/CBB970025272/)
Book
Higgs, Catherine;
(2012)
Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa
(/isis/citation/CBB001421818/)
Thesis
Meghan Daly Costa;
(2017)
Early Modern Knowledge Problems: Race and Epistemology in the Seventeenth-Century English Imagination
(/isis/citation/CBB201527757/)
Book
Peckham, Robert;
Pomfret, David M.;
(2013)
Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia
(/isis/citation/CBB001214650/)
Book
Mario J. Azevedo;
(2017)
Historical Perspectives on the State of Health and Health Systems in Africa, Volume I: The Pre-Colonial and Colonial Eras
(/isis/citation/CBB074166022/)
Thesis
David Alan Varel;
(2015)
Race, Class, and Socialization: Allison Davis and Twentieth-century American Social Thought
(/isis/citation/CBB664780930/)
Book
Thomas S. Mullaney;
Benjamin Peters;
Mar Hicks;
Kavita Philip;
(2021)
Your Computer Is on Fire
(/isis/citation/CBB159272535/)
Book
Ron Mallon;
(2016)
The Construction of Human Kinds
(/isis/citation/CBB828263565/)
Article
Sudev Sheth;
Geoffrey Jones;
Morgan Spencer;
(Autumn 2021)
Emboldening and Contesting Gender and Skin Color Stereotypes in the Film Industry in India, 1947–1991
(/isis/citation/CBB186027195/)
Article
Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst;
Luna Dolezal;
(2018)
Cosmetic Surgery as "Cut-Up": The Body and Gender in Breyer P-Orridge's Pandrogeny
(/isis/citation/CBB410641240/)
Article
Simon, Linda;
(2014)
Battling the “Invincible Predator”: Alzheimer's Disease as Metaphor
(/isis/citation/CBB001202130/)
Article
Elizabeth Grennan Browning;
(October 2021)
Wastelanding and Racialized Reproductive Labor: “Long Dyings” in East Chicago from Urban Renewal to Superfund Remediation
(/isis/citation/CBB660342726/)
Article
Carmen V. Harris;
(2019)
The South Carolina Home in Black and White: Race, Gender, and Power in Home Demonstration Work
(/isis/citation/CBB904806755/)
Article
Dennis Pohl;
(2021)
Uranium exposed at Expo 58: The colonial agenda behind the peaceful atom
(/isis/citation/CBB074770675/)
Book
Michael Ra-shon Hall;
(2021)
Freedom beyond confinement: travel and imagination in African American cultural history and letters
(/isis/citation/CBB148156098/)
Be the first to comment!