Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada's Black Beauty Culture

319 Pages·2019·7.043 MB·English

by  Cheryl Thompson

Beauty

ina
Box
Thompson (FA).indd 1 2019-01-18 9:28 AM
Thompson (FA).indd 2 2019-01-18 9:28 AM
Beauty

in a
Box
DETANGLING THE ROOTS OF
CANADA’S BLACK BEAUTY CULTURE
CHERYL THOMPSON
Thompson (FA).indd 3 2019-01-18 9:28 AM
WILFRID LAURIER
UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the
Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using
funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Wilfrid
Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our
publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada
through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. This work was supported by the
Research Support Fund.
Funded by the
Government of Canada aunn Oorngtaanriiosm geo vdeur ngmouevnet rangeemnecnyt de l’Ontario
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Thompson, Cheryl, 1977–, author
Beauty in a box : detangling the roots of Canada’s black beauty culture / Cheryl Thompson.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77112-358-7 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-77112-360-0 (EPUB).—
ISBN 978-1-77112-359-4 (PDF)
1. Black Canadian women—Health and hygiene—History—20th century. 2. Beauty,
Personal—Canada—History—20th century. 3. Beauty, Personal—Social aspects—Canada—
History—20th century. 4. Beauty culture—Social aspects—Canada—History—20th century.
5. Black Canadian women—Social conditions—20th century. 6. African-American women—
Race identity. 7. African-Americans—Race identity. 8. Hair—Social aspects—United States.
9. Beauty, Personal—United States. I. Title.
HQ1220.C3T46 2019 391.0089’96071 C2018-904624-4
C2018-904625-2
Cover and text design by Chris Rowat Design.
© 2019 Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
www.wlupress.wlu.ca
This book is printed on FSC® certified paper and is certified Ecologo. It contains post-consumer
fibre, is processed chlorine free, and is manufactured using biogas energy.
Printed in Canada
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in
this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called
to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence
from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright
licence, visit http://www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Thompson (FA).indd 4 2019-01-18 9:28 AM
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
CHAPTER 1 African Canadian Newspapers and Early Black Beauty
Culture, 1914–1945 35
CHAPTER 2 From Ebony’s “Brownskin” to “Black Is Beautiful” in the
News Observer, 1946–1969 69
CHAPTER 3 Black Beauty Culture in the Pages of Contrast and Share:
Local Beauty Salons, Department Stores, and Drugstores
in the 1970s and 1980s 121
CHAPTER 4 Global Conglomerates Take Over Black Beauty Culture:
The Ethnically Ambiguous, “Multicultural” 1990s and
2000s 165
CHAPTER 5 The Politics of Black Hair in the Twenty-First Century 197
Conclusion 243
Notes 261
Selected Bibliography 291
Index 305
Thompson (FA).indd 5 2019-01-18 9:28 AM
Thompson (FA).indd 6 2019-01-18 9:28 AM
INTRODUCTION
This book is about black beauty culture in Canada. Historically, the topic
has received little scholarly attention in terms of Canadian history, advertis-
ing history, media studies, and histories of race and racism. This book aims
to fill in this gap. Beauty in a Box is one of the first book-length projects to
explore not only the discursive politics attached to black women’s hair and
skin but also the historical, transnational flow of products, beauty imagery,
and services between the United States and Canada since the nineteenth
century. One of the reasons why this topic has not received much attention
until now is that the task of locating black voices in the Canadian historical
record has been and remains a difficult challenge. There is also a general lack
of cultural awareness about black Canadian women’s consumer practices.
In No Burden to Carry (1991), for example, Dionne Brand observed of
black women in Ontario that “these black women could talk about black
women’s lives in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, decades which seem
to be missing in the historical record of black life in Canada.”1 The dearth
of information about, and references to, black women led Brand to employ
oral history as a method of inquiry. By recuperating textual histories along
with records of a visual, ephemeral black culture, Beauty in a Box fills a
gap in the historical record about black Canadian women not only in the
period between the two world wars but in the post-1960s period, when a
black immigration wave fundamentally changed black communities and
the nation. This book argues that black beauty culture is an important
aspect of the Canadian narrative that deserves not only critical interven-
tion but also inclusion in wider conversations about race, capitalism, black
feminism, retail consumerism, media, and advertising.
1
Thompson (FA).indd 1 2019-01-18 9:28 AM
2 BEAUTY IN A BOX
This book is also a transnational study. As a theoretical frame, transna-
tionalism is often used to explore two separate issues. In the first instance,
the conceptual framework of transnationalism describes large-scale pro-
cesses, movements, and migrations that cross national borders, as well as
the transformation of the everyday lives of people whose practices and
social locations are restructured in, and through, their entanglements with,
and within, multiple sites of diaspora.2 In Canada, much of the scholarship
on transnationalism as it relates to race has focused on this definition, as
well as migrations and movements away from and back to the Caribbean.
As D. Alissa Trotz observes, “[This scholarship] . . . (the vast bulk of which
addresses itself to the post-1960s period) has tended to frame the debate
in terms of settlement, assimilation, incorporation, adjustment and mar-
ginalization.”3 Such scholarship has also placed heightened importance
on the border and on discourses of belonging and not belonging to the
nation, as well as emphasizing the experiences of Caribbean diasporas in
Toronto and Montreal. Beauty in a Box engages in a similar transnational
discussion, primarily in the first three chapters, where I chart not only the
movement of black people into Canada and between provinces but also
the strategies used by Caribbean and African American immigrants in the
first half of the twentieth century to build community, establish diasporic
networks, and redefine themselves amid a dominant culture rife with anti-
black and anti-immigration sentiment.
In the second instance, this book uses a definition of transnationalism
that describes the movement of consumer capitalism into Canada and the
convergence between local media and global advertising. It aims to explore
the circulation of media, goods, and products from the United States and
Canada, and how that circulation has been shaped by a globalizing American
culture, especially in the post-1970s era, when black consumer and aesthetic
practices reflected an Americanized form of blackness. Stated otherwise, as
images crossed the border, ideologies and aesthetic practices also entered
Canada, which led to a standard of beauty that more resembles an African
American standard than one said to “represent” a black Canadian standard.
In her examination of the circulation and travel of Indian citizens
between India and the United States at the end of the twentieth century,
Interpal Grewal found that “Americanness was produced transnationally
by cultural, political and economic practices, so that becoming Ameri-
can did not always or necessarily connote full participation or belong-
ing to a nation-state.”4 Consumer culture, she explains further, “produced
other transnational identifications and subjects where desires and fantasies
Thompson (FA).indd 2 2019-01-18 9:28 AM
INTrOdUcTION 3
crossed national borders but also remained tied to national imaginaries.”5
I argue that, while black Canadians did not necessarily travel to and from
the United States as in the Indian context, similarly, there were cultural
and economic practices that were co-produced through the circulation of
“African Americanness” via local black media throughout the twentieth
century. Canada’s consumer culture also co-produced transnational iden-
tifications and subjects. As a result, African American images, products,
and ideologies crossed the border as desires and fantasies via advertising
and, later, television and film.
This book articulates a spatial understanding of how the transna-
tional—as movements/migrations and as desires/fantasies—has shaped
black Canadian culture. Beauty in a Box probes the distance between black
communities across the country, both geographic and symbolic, but it
also considers their proximity to African American communities, espe-
cially regarding cultural, aesthetic, and consumer practices. Importantly,
Robin Winks’s The Blacks in Canada: A History (1971) was the first book
to provide a comprehensive early history of black people in Canada. In it,
Winks, a white author and history scholar who taught at Yale University,
acknowledged the role black people played in Canadian history, especially
regarding community-building and resistance to anti-black racism, but he
also downplayed the importance of the advertising pages of the black press,
among other things. Many of these publications were short-lived, and even
though they may have contributed to a sense of racial pride among Afri-
can Canadians, Winks opined that the papers “performed a temporar-
ily useful supplemental function while generally avoiding controversial
themes.”6 Second, he argued that these newspapers carried more adver-
tising than news, and that the advertisements often were of a “dubious
nature,” emphasizing hairpieces, cosmetics, and funeral parlours, together
with references to butchers, dairies, restaurants, plumbers, and laundries
that would accept black customers.7
Winks, who was writing at a time of social unrest in America, stripped
away the myth of Canada as a place where black people were welcomed
with open arms, but he still did not allow African Americans and black
Canadians much agency.8 As Martin Berger observes of civil rights images
in the 1960s, their success was hinged on “focusing attention on acts of vio-
lence and away from historically rooted injustices in public accommoda-
tion, voting rights, housing policies, and labor practices.” The photographs
of racial violence, he writes further, “read in isolation illustrated racism as
an interpersonal problem . . . and this obscured the structural inequalities
Thompson (FA).indd 3 2019-01-18 9:28 AM