Over-MakingNyanga
Mastering "Natural" Beauty and Disciplining Excessive Bodily Practices In Metropolitan Cameroon
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2098276 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué (0000-0003-1552-466X, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 62 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 175-198 |
| Publication date | 2019-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | African Studies Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-0206 • E-ISSN: 1555-2462 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/asr.2018.110 |
| OpenAlex | W2947599981 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 30 |
This study examines how Anglophone urban elites in 1960s metropolitan Cameroon negotiated local and global ideas about culturally constructed forms of "natural" black beauty. Formally-educated Christian urbanites, such as freelance female journalists, who often worked as civil servants, sought to discipline women's bodily practices and emotional expressivity in order to regulate the boundaries of perceived feminine respectability and to define a woman's "natural" beauty, a descriptor with both internal and external implications. The language they used included both local terms such asnyanga, a Cameroonian Pidgin English word for varied ideas about beauty and stylishness, and standard English terms. This specific use of language illustrates the hybridity of understandings of natural beauty and bodily comportment, painting a distinct African imagery denoting the social progression of black Cameroonian elite subcultures
Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Elite · Hybridity · Linguistics · Natural (archaeology · Pidgin · Political science · Sociology · African history and culture studies · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society
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Tracing Language Movement in Africa
The Most Beautiful Girl in the World
Ain't I a Beauty Queen?
Discipline and Punish
Remaking Black Power
African Sexualities
African Encounters with Domesticity
Heterosexual Africa
Gender Trouble
Bodies that Matter
Housewives at Husbands’ Throats
Anti–Mini Militants Meet Modern Misses’
Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cameroon
Bodies in Contact
Mama Africa
Rewriting Patriarchal Scripts
The Modern Girl and Racial Respectability in 1930s South Africa
Purity and Danger
Clothing and Difference
A Colonial Lexicon
Tracing Language Movement in Africa
Bodies That Matter
Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women
Black beauty
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |