Buy Black

“Buy Black offers an important and well-argued consideration of the Black women cultural producers who, in an effort to subvert a misogynoiristic system, sometimes traffic in the very stereotypical practices they wish to upend. Halliday’s concept of ‘embodied objectification’ helps to make clear our own investments in consumer capitalism and prompts us to be more circumspect about our participation as a means to some ultimately unsatisfying end.”--Moya Bailey, author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance

"In focusing on Black women as culture-makers, the book provides a uniquely important view as to the ways that Black women's ingenuity and entrepreneurship have been largely overlooked in understanding these questions. I was consistently impressed with the author's ability to cast a wide net that moves across many topics, while keeping it all held together so that the shape and fit seem right."--Elizabeth Chin, author of My Life with Things: The Consumer Diaries

“Buy Black is a brilliant and meticulously researched exploration of how ideas about representing blackness have been essential to the story of American consumer industries and our popular culture. Aria Halliday has masterfully shown how Black women have, perhaps surprisingly to many readers, played a central role as cultural producers in American consumer industries of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from their role developing dolls marketed to Black girls to manufacturing natural haircare products aimed at capturing a sense of racial authenticity and pride in Black female consumers. Attuned to the significance of how ideas about blackness reflect the white supremacist gaze of consumerism, Black women act as arbiters of a representational economy in which they attempt to define what constitutes Black authenticity and respectability for themselves. For Halliday, Black women are key innovators of industrial products and corporate marketing strategies that attempt to realize the promise of Black consumerism both within and against logics of racial capitalism. In uncovering how Black women have sought to transform corporate discourses of multiculturalism and diversity by inserting their own imaginations, capabilities and desires, Buy Black is an extraordinary feminist reading of the role of race, gender, and class in the American consumer product industry. Halliday’s book is essential reading for anyone interested in a Black feminist critical lens to the story of American late capitalism.--Mireille Miller-Young, author of A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography