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Basel History Lecture: Skin Color and Race in African History
October 15, 2020 @ 6:15 pm - 8:00 pm
Basel History Lecture 2020* Thursday, October 15, 2020, 6.15 pm (CEST)
Prof. Lynn M. Thomas University of Washington, Seattle Skin Color and Race in African History: A Layered Approach
At the height of apartheid in South Africa, cosmetic skin lighteners were popular and highly profitable commodities. During the 1980s, opposition to skin lighteners became a corollary of the anti-apartheid movement. That anti-racist activism ensured that today South Africa possesses – on the books, at least – the world’s most extensive prohibitions on skin lighteners. To explain how and why skin lighteners became such commonplace and contentious commodities in South Africa, Thomas takes a layered approach, an approach that reconstructs sedimented meanings and compounded politics. Understanding people’s everyday experiences of skin color requires attention to trans-regional histories of slavery, colonialism, and segregation as well as to the collateral development of consumer capitalism, visual media, techno-medical innovations, and protest politics.
*Due to the Covid-19 situation, the lecture will be streamed online. To access the lecture, please register on our website: https://dg.philhist.unibas.ch/de/aktuelles/basel-history-lecture/