Stylin’: African-American Expressive Culture, from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit
by Shane White

"Focusing on such variegated indicators of black style as dress, hair, body language, and dance, the authors reveal an evolving semiotics of black self-creating that has been designed from its very outset to impose a degree of individuality on the numbing uniformity bred of slavery, poverty, Jim Crow laws, and white racism…. This volume represents an excellent example of how to use the most unlikely materials, such as newspaper-sponsored beauty pageants from the ’20s, to examine how a people’s culture defines its values in the face of oppression…. Well written and intelligently argued. It even has that rarity of rarities in a university press book: a preface that is delightfully funny. A highly useful contribution to black history from an unexpected direction, in every sense of that phrase."