Beneath the Surface by Thomas, L

ISBN 9781776146154

Publisher: Wits University Press 2020

368 pages

Soft cover 

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 colour from precolonial times to the postcolonial present. From indigenous skinbrightening practices and the rapid spread of lighteners in South African consumer culture during the 1940s and 1950s to the growth of a billiondollar global lightener industry,