Book Talk: Buy Black, The Hope of a Black Princess

Monday, March 28, 2022 | 12:00 PM ET | ICC 662, Government/History Conference Room, Georgetown University Main Campus | RSVP to Leslie Byers — lunch will be served

Presented by the Georgetown University Women’s and Gender Studies Program, Department of African American Studies, American Studies Program, and Gender⁺ Justice Initiative.

Join us for a presentation and book signing with Aria Halliday and learn about her book Buy Black How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2022).

Buy Black examines the role American Black women play in Black consumption in the US and worldwide, with a focus on their pivotal role in packaging Black feminine identity since the 1960s. Through an exploration of the dolls, princesses, and rags-to-riches stories that represent Black girlhood and womanhood in everything from haircare to Nicki Minaj’s hip-hop, Aria S. Halliday spotlights how the products created by Black women have furthered Black women’s position as the moral compass and arbiter of Black racial progress.

Far-ranging and bold, Buy Black reveals what attitudes inform a contemporary Black sensibility based in representation and consumerism. It also traces the parameters of Black symbolic power, mapping the sites where intraracial ideals of blackness, womanhood, beauty, play, and sexuality meet and mix in consumer and popular culture.

About the author:

Aria Halliday is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Women’s Studies and African American and Africana Studies, the University of Kentucky.

Accommodation requests can be made at genderjustice@georgetown.edu.