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Skin Colour Politics

Whiteness and Beauty in India

  • Book
  • © 2022

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Authors:
  1. Nina Kullrich

    1. Hamburg, Germany

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Table of contents (5 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-viii
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  2. “In This Country, Beauty is Defined by Fairness of Skin”

    • Nina Kullrich
    Pages 1-50

  3. ‘Colourism’ in India Within and Beyond Colonialism: Historically tracing Fair Skin as a locally embedded, yet transnational, colonially re-shaped and subversively contested signifier of social status and norm of beauty

    • Nina Kullrich
    Pages 51-94

  4. Beauty as Project, Fairness as Product: ‘Skin Colour’ Management and Fairness Consumption in Post-colonial India

    • Nina Kullrich
    Pages 95-141

  5. Shades of Fair, Shapes of Beauty, and Shifts of Status: Narrating and Practising Skin Bleaching in Contemporary Delhi

    • Nina Kullrich
    Pages 143-229

  6. Conclusion and Outlook

    • Nina Kullrich
    Pages 231-244

  7. Back Matter

    Pages 245-268
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Keywords

About this book

The global practice of skin bleaching is predominantly understood as an internalized legacy of colonialism and an embodiment of Western ideals of beauty. This book offers a new perspective on fair skin preference in India: it challenges the assumption that desires for light skin are always a desire of whiteness. Rather than talking back to the colonial centre, skin colour politics reorganise and reinforce social distinctions in Indian societies, which are neither exclusively local nor global. Based on primary research conducted in Delhi, this multi-dimensional study shows how skin colour intersects with and reproduces other categories of social distinction – primarily gender, class, caste, race, region and religion. It historically embeds fairness as an Indian, precolonial yet transnational ideal of beauty. The bleached body emerges as an active and thus, potentially resistant part of negotiating social status within multiple power relations and complex beauty regimes. By mapping a whole geography of skin colours in India, this book shows how fair skin as a locally embedded beauty norm and whiteness as a global cultural imperative interrelate.

Authors and Affiliations

  • Hamburg, Germany

    Nina Kullrich

About the author

Nina Kullrich graduated in cultural and literary studies and currently works as project coordinator for an NGO with a focus on global justice and intersectional feminisms.

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Skin Colour Politics

  • Book Subtitle: Whiteness and Beauty in India

  • Authors: Nina Kullrich

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64922-0

  • Publisher: J.B. Metzler Berlin, Heidelberg

  • eBook Packages: J.B. Metzler Humanities (German Language)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature 2022

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-662-64921-3Published: 15 February 2022

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-662-64922-0Published: 14 February 2022

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: VIII, 268

  • Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations

  • Topics: Cultural Studies

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