New Books In African American Studies

In Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2022), Aria Halliday negotiates the line between "sell out" and "for us, by us," exploring how Black women cultural producers' further Black women's historical position as the moral compass and arbiter of Black racial progress in the United States.  Black women cultural producers' aesthetic choices communicate that even though capitalist discourses dictate that anything is sellable in our society, there are some symbols of beauty, femininity, and sexuality that sell better than others because of how they occupy the set of already recognizable and, at times, relatable representations of blackness. While they compete in the consumer market for the attention and loyalty of Black consumer dollars, their capitulation to white corporate interests and audiences requires propagating historical tensions regarding Black consumer citizenship and multicultural inclusion. Each chapter contextualizes the role that Black women in the Uni