REPRESENTED

by Brenna Wynn Greer

***WINNER***

2020 Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies 

**Now Available in Paperback**

“A wonderful and pioneering book that raises fresh questions about business, civil rights, and African American history. Complicating what it means to be a black capitalist, Brenna Wynn Greer charts a new path with her innovative framing of ‘Civil Rights work.’”
— Quincy Mills, author of "Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America"

Represented explores how African American entrepreneurs produced photographs, magazines, and advertising that forged a close association between blackness and Americanness. In particular, black mediamakers and marketers popularized conceptions of African Americans as enthusiastic consumers, a status essential to postwar citizenship claims. But, their media creations were complicated: subject to marketplace dictates, they often relied on gender, class, and family stereotypes.

Demand for such representations came not only from corporate and government clients to fuel mass consumerism and attract support for national efforts, such as the fight against fascism, but also from African Americans who sought depictions of blackness to counter racist ideas that undermined their rights and their national belonging as citizens.

Black imagemakers discovered that, after World War II, the visual representation of African Americans as good citizens was good business. Their story reminds us that the path to civil rights involved capitalistic, commercial endeavors as well as social and political activism.

“Represented presents a powerful, critical, and wholly original analysis of the relationships between race, capital, and citizenship. Through a sophisticated and subtle reading of history, and a close examination of prominent black media makers, Brenna Wynn Greer offers an interpretation that rightly positions black people as shapers of American economy and postwar public culture. The book is a sorely needed contribution to the literature on black capitalism, media culture, and civil rights activism.”
— Marc Lamont Hill, author of "Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond"
“Beautifully written and meticulously researched, Represented is a groundbreaking, exemplary book that makes a field-defining intervention into the relationship between visual culture, capitalism, and citizenship.”
— Elspeth Brown, author of "Work! A Queer History of Modeling"
“Brenna Wynn Greer reveals how corporations and professional image-makers gave us some of our earliest photographic visions of freedom, showing how they captured, in the process, our most iconic snapshots of the black freedom struggle. Black capitalism and black activism have long been part of a single history. Represented now gifts us that history—timely and transformative—in a single, important book.”
— N. D. B. Connolly, author of "A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida"

Represented Reviews