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.

Aria S. Halliday is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and Program in African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky.

List of Figures vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Making of Black Womanhood 1
1. Theorizing Black Women’s Cultural Influence through Consumption 17
2. From Riots to Style: The History of Black Barbie 47
3. From Bootstraps to Glass Slippers: Black Women’s Uplift in Disney’s Princess Canon 79
4. A Black Barbie’s Moment: Nicki Minaj and the Struggle for Cultural Dominance 111
Coda: The Stakes of Twenty-First-Century Black Creativity 143
Notes 153
Bibliography 165
Index 181