Erin D. CHAPMAN. Prove It on Me

Erin D. Chapman's Prove It on Me is an excellent and important contribution to several overlapping fields, including twentieth-century U.S. history, gender history, African American history, sexuality studies, and the history of popular culture. This well-researched and clearly argued study explores the tensions between black women's social history and popular culture's spectacle of black femininity in the context of New Negro modernity. The project bridges several historiographic divides, especially those concerning cultural history and the history of the market, while offering several analytical gems that make this book recommended reading for historians, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduates as well. Chapman's book examines how black women, participating in the social and cultural transformations reshaping American culture in the wake of the great migration, sought social change and self-transformation in the context of twin, competing discourses of black female modernity. One of these discourses was what Chapman calls the “sex-race marketplace”: both a commercial site that offered goods for sale, such as films, records, and personal care products, as well as a discursive space that tied spectacular representations of black femininity to both sex and the market. Chapman argues that the goods themselves, and the fantasies that sold them, were steeped in densely racialized and sexual language that offered possibilities for self-transformation but remained overdetermined by both black masculinism and white racism.

Context (archaeology) · Cultural history · Femininity · Human sexuality · Media studies · Modernity · Political science · Popular culture · Sociology · Anthropology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies