Black Beauty Culture
Professor: Dr. Jonathan Michael Square
Email: jsquare@fas.harvard.edu
Course Description
The history of black beauty culture mirrors the complexities of both African and Afro-diasporic cultures. People of African descent have always used their African roots and their own artistic ingenuity to create styles and standards that reflect unique black cultures. Black beauty cultures have also been in dialogue with other aesthetic traditions, most notably European and Eurocentric beauty standards. Black is beautiful, yet people of African descent have often had to struggle to craft a self-presentation that is both acceptable to themselves and larger society.
As a result, some black hair care and cosmetic practices have been defined by “managing” (i.e., straightening, lightening, etc.) rather than embracing unaltered phenotypes that can signal African ancestry. Many people of African descent are relearning how to care for their hair and skin in all its melanated and kinky glory. At the same time, those who do choose to straighten and augment their hair with extensions, weaves, and wigs are doing so in a way that does not valorize, but subverts Eurocentric beauty standards.
In this class, we will explore various facets of black beauty culture. Topics will run the gamut from hair maintenance during slavery, the rise of the black beauty industry, black beauty pageants, barbershops, skin bleaching, extensions, weaves, and wigs, braiding, black models, the natural hair movement, queer black aesthetics, and more. Course material will cover the African Diaspora in its full complexity, including the United States, Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and even Europe. The syllabus is organized roughly by chronology and theme.
Over the course of the semester, we will work collaboratively to create a magazine that explores the themes of this course. You will be expected to make three contributions to the magazine, the last of which will be a 10-page research paper.
The class will be a seminar with high expectations of participation. Please come to class prepared to participate actively in class discussions. No laptops or tablets will be allowed in this class unless you can provide proof that is necessary tool in your intellectual development in the classroom. Attendance and participation will be worth 20% of your final grade.
Research paper - 30%
Worksheet -10%
Magazine contributions - 20% x 2
Attendance & participation -20%
Course Schedule
Sept. 5
Black Beauty Culture: An Introduction
Sept.12
Beauty Regimes in the Age of Slavery
Shane White and Graham White, “Done Up in the Tastiest Manner,” in Stylin': African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 37-62.
Helen Bradley Foster, “Embellishing the Head,” in New Raiments of Self: African American Clothing in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 245-271.
Sept. 19
Aesthetic Discourses of the New Negro
Quincy T. Mills, “Rise of the New Negro Barber,” in Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 145-186.
Davarian L. Baldwin, “Making Do: Beauty, Enterprise, and the ‘Makeover’ of the Race Womanhood,” in Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 53-90.
Sept. 26
Archiving Black Beauty
We will spend this class in the archive at Schlesinger Library, exploring archived documents and periodicals related to the course topic. This visit will entail you completing a worksheet that will be 10% of your final grade. It is due by the end of the day.
Oct. 3
What is natural?
Craig, Maxine, “The Decline and Fall of the Conk; or, How to Read a Process,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 1.4 (1997): 399-419.
Kobena Mercer, “Black Hair/Style Politics,” New Formations 3.3 (1997): 33-54.
Marjon Carlos, “Why Can't a Black Woman Have Perfect Bedhead?” Elle, April 17, 2014, http://www.elle.com/beauty/hair/tips/a12698/perfect-bedhead/.
Emma Tarlo, “Black Hair” and “Race,” in Entanglement (London: Oneworld Publications, 2016), 131-185.
1st magazine contribution due by midnight
Oct. 10
Photographing Black Skin
Richard Dyer, “The Light of the World,” White (London: Routledge, 1997), 82-144.
Ann Hornaday, “‘12 Years a Slave,’ ‘Mother of George,’ and the Aesthetic Politics of Filming Black Skin,” The Washington Post, October 17, 2013, http://wapo.st/H6NsBi?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.bae4c6075be5
Syreeta McFadden, “Teaching The Camera To See My Skin: Navigating Photography’s Inherited Bias against Dark Skin," Buzzfeed, April 2, 2014, https://www.buzzfeed.com/syreetamcfadden/teaching-the-camera-to-see-my-skin?utm_term=.mwrbqY7VYa#.ow4v9nwRnp
Lorna Roth, “Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity,” Canadian Journal of Communication 34.1 (2009), 111-136.
Oct. 17
Latin American Perspectives
Guest lecture by Miari Stephens, doctoral candidate in AAAS
Kia Lilly Caldwell, “’Look at Her Hair’: The Body Politics of Black Womanhood,” Negras in Brazil: Re-envisioning Black Women, Citizenship, and the Politics of Identity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 81-106.
Ginetta Candelario, “’They Are Taken into Account for Their Opinions’: Making Community and Displaying Identity at a Dominican Beauty Shop in New York City” and “’Black Women Are Confusing, but the Hair Lets You Know': Perceiving the Boundaries of Dominicanidad,” in Black Behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2007), 177-255.
Pelo malo, 2013 (movie, available on Kanopy)
Oct. 24
Beauty and Justice
Zadie Smith, On Beauty (novel) Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just
Oct. 31
The Politics of Black Beauty on American College Campuses
Karen W. Tice, “Pride and Pulchritude,” in Queens of Academe: Beauty Pageants and Campus Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 41-67.
Tanisha Ford, “Soul Style on Campus: American College Women and Black Power Fashion,” in Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 95-121.
Nov. 7
Queering Black Beauty
Paris Is Burning (film) Pose, Season 1, Episode 1
Marlon M. Bailey, “’It’s Gonna Get Severe Up in Here': Ball Events, Ritualized Performance, and Black Queer Space,” in Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 124-181.
2nd magazine contribution due by midnight
Nov. 14
Black Models Matter
Elizabeth Wissinger, “Black-Black-Black: How Race Is Read,” in This Year's Model: Fashion, Media, and the Making of Glamour (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 216-242.
Angela Natividad, “This African Model Fights for Diversity in Fashion by Remaking Some of Its Famous Ads,” Ad Week, December 14, 2016,
http://www.adweek.com/creativity/african-model-fights-diversity-fashion-re-enacting-some-its-famous-ads-175059/.
Nov. 28
Beauty in a Bottle
Kathy Peiss, “Shades of Difference,” in Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 203-237.
Jemima Pierre, “The Fact of Lightness: Skin Bleaching and the Colored Codes of Racial Aesthetics,” in The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 102-122.
Dec. 5
Revolutionary Roots
Robin D. G. Kelley, “Nap Time: Historicizing the Afro,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 1.4 (1997): 339-52.
Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps, “Revolutionary Root,” in Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2002), 50-71.
Tanisha Ford, “Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful,” Aperture 228, Fall 2017, 46-53.
Final research paper due