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Beauty in a Box

Detangling the Roots of Canada's Black Beauty Culture
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2019

About this book

One of the first transnational, feminist studies of Canada’s black beauty culture and the role that media, retail, and consumers have played in its development, Beauty in a Box widens our understanding of the politics of black hair.

The book analyzes advertisements and articles from media—newspapers, advertisements, television, and other sources—that focus on black communities in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, and Calgary. The author explains the role local black community media has played in the promotion of African American–owned beauty products; how the segmentation of beauty culture (i.e., the sale of black beauty products on store shelves labelled “ethnic hair care”) occurred in Canada; and how black beauty culture, which was generally seen as a small niche market before the 1970s, entered Canada’s mainstream by way of department stores, drugstores, and big-box retailers.

Beauty in a Box uses an interdisciplinary framework, engaging with African American history, critical race and cultural theory, consumer culture theory, media studies, diasporic art history, black feminism, visual culture, film studies, and political economy to explore the history of black beauty culture in both Canada and the United States.

Author / Editor information

Contributor: Cheryl Thompson Cheryl Thompson is an Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Industries, Faculty of Communication and Design at Ryerson University. She previously held a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship (2016-2018) at the University of Toronto. She earned her PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University. Dr. Thompson was born and raised in Toronto.

Reviews

The transnational scope of Thompson’s work should not be understated. Indeed, she does an excellent job of showing the late growth of Canada’s Caribbean diaspora following the Second World War as a primary reason for the delayed development of a distinctly Canadian Black beauty culture. --- “Beauty in a Box makes a critical contribution to the history of beauty in Canada. One of the first studies to focus exclusively on Black women’s beauty in twentieth-century Canada, it is a wide-ranging, ambitious recuperative work that adds significantly to our knowledge of a Black beauty culture deeply rooted in Canada. …[The book] lays a firm foundation for future work on beauty, the body, and race. “ – Jane Nicholas, Canadian Journal of History 56.1, 2021 --- "Beauty in a Box is a magnificent body of work that centers the hidden history of black Canadian beauty culture in relationship to advertising, retail establishments, and women’s magazines. By including black Canadian women within the visual culture of modernity, Cheryl Thompson rejects the erasure of black female Canadian bodies from representations of beauty and consumerism in Canada. In addition, as a brilliantly pioneering examination of how African American beauty culture shaped black Canada, Thompson fills an important gap in research on global black beauty culture. Beauty in a Box stands as one of the most captivating and well-researched tomes to examine black beauty culture in Canada and transnationally. Read this book!”

Topics

  • Publicly Available

    Front Matter

    i
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    Contents

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    Introduction

    1
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    African Canadian Newspapers and Early Black Beauty Culture, 1914–1945

    35
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    From Ebony’s “Brownskin” to “Black is Beautiful” in the News Observer, 1946–1969

    69
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    Black Beauty Culture in the Pages of Contrast and Share: Local Beauty Salons, Department Stores, and Drugstores in the 1970s and 1980s

    121
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    Global Conglomerates Take Over Black Beauty Culture: The Ethnically Ambiguous, “Multicultural” 1990S and 2000S

    165
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    The Politics of Black Hair in the Twenty-First Century

    197
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    Conclusion

    243
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    Notes

    261
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    Selected Bibliography

    291
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    Index

    305
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
January 23, 2024
eBook ISBN:
9781771123594
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
310
View content
https://doi.org/10.51644/9781771123594
eBook ISBN: 9781771123594
Keywords for this book
Black beauty; black hair; hair straightening; chemical relaxers; Afros; hair weaves; beauty pageants; fashion; models; skin-bleaching; blacknewspapers; black-magazines; Ebony-magazine; African Canadians; New Negro; Chatelaine; Viola Desmond
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
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