I like Your Colour!' Skin Bleaching and Geographies of Race in Urban Ghana

Bibliographic Data

ID4756514
AuthorsJemima Pierre (Anthropology and an affiliate of the Center for African and African American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin., corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume90
Issue1
Pages9-29
Publication date2008-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0141-7789 • E-ISSN: 1466-4380
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/fr.2008.36
OpenAlexW2084979547
LanguageEN
Citations received30
References cited27

This article explores chemical skin bleaching practices in urban Ghana to demonstrate the ways that particular racialized understandings of meaning are deployed in a contemporary postcolonial African society. I argue that the processes of racialization indexed by skin bleaching in Ghana must be contextualized within global racial formations; specifically, they can only be understood by examining the interlinked local and global ideologies and practices of race. In elaborating this argument, the essay also engages with contemporary African diaspora theorization that tends to foreground diasporic identity and experience at the expense of contemporary continental processes. By bringing a postcolonial African society into a dialogue about race, processes of racialization, and the interlinked transnational construction of black identities, this essay offers one way out of the ambivalent relationship that I believe diaspora theorization has with Africa

Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Argument (complex analysis) · Diaspora · Epistemology · Identity (music) · Ideology · Meaning (existential) · Political science · Politics · Postcolonialism (international relations) · Race (biology) · Racialization · Sociology · Anthropology · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Race, History, and American Society · Social Psychology