Book Launch and Discussion of Lynn M. Thomas’s Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners | 22 Sept | 6pm
WiSER invites you to the launch of Lynn M. Thomas’s
Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners
Published by Duke and Wits University Presses.
A conversation about the book and its visual images between Hlonipha Mokoena (WiSER) and Lynn M. Thomas (History, University of Washington), moderated by Pamila Gupta (WiSER).
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 of antiracist struggle and lighteners as a technology of visibility that both challenges and entrenches racial and gender hierarchies.
Tuesday, 22nd September 2020
6pm (SA Time)
Please register for this Zoom event in advance of the meeting at https://wits-za.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUuduyhpj4oE9CIQ5RvjL0MJblckkkR5gfr