Prove It On Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s - Softcover

Prove It on Me illuminates the complexities of the New Negro era by refusing to simplify the forces shaping black life in the United States... It is a study of courage and conviction. (The Journal of American History)

Erin D. Chapman's Prove It on Me is an excellent and important contribution to several overlapping fields, including twentieth-century U.S. history, gender history, African American history, sexuality studies, and the history of popular culture... Chapman's fine work is an excellent contribution to a conversation underway about the relationship between the market and black modernity... It is an exemplary work of cultural history that provides new reading of important historical texts and figures, while offering new analytic frameworks that will influence emerging scholarship in several fields. (American Historical Review)

A robust cultural history...Prove It On Me is a necessary read for those interested in a deeply invested and methodologically potent cultural history of black gender and sexual politics in inter-war America... This text will become a canonical study of black women's cultural history in many years to come. (Callaloo)

In the wake of the Great Migration of thousands of African Americans from the scattered hamlets and farms of the rural South to the nation's burgeoning cities, a New Negro ethos of modernist cultural expression and potent self-determination arose to challenge white supremacy and create opportunities for racial advancement. In Prove It On Me, Erin D. Chapman explores the gender and sexual politics of this modern racial ethos and reveals the constraining and exploitative underside of the New Negro era's vaunted liberation and opportunities. Chapman's cultural history documents the effects on black women of the intersection of primitivism, New Negro patriarchal aspirations, and the early twentieth-century consumer culture. As U.S. society invested in the New Negroes, turning their expressions and race politics into entertaining commodities in a sexualized, primitivist popular culture, the New Negroes invested in the idea of black womanhood as a pillar of stability against the unsettling forces of myriad social and racial transformations. And both groups used black women's bodies and identities to "prove" their own modern notions and new identities. Chapman's analysis brings together advertisements selling the blueswoman to black and white consumers in a "sex-race marketplace," the didactic preachments of New Negro reformers advocating a conservative gender politics of "race motherhood," and the words of the New Negro women authors and migrants who boldly or implicitly challenged these dehumanizing discourses. Prove It On Me investigates the uses made of black women's bodies in 1920s popular culture and racial politics and black women's opportunities to assert their own modern, racial identities.