Crafting Allure: Beauty, Culture and Identity

Book excerpt: This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2014. Crafting Allure: Beauty, Culture and Identity explores the complexity of physical beauty, the kind we can see in human beings, their representations, and in nature. From the self-presentations of eighteenth-century English ladies, to that of Civil Rights era African-American protestors, Afro-French women, and contemporary Asian-Indians; to the meanings of mannequins, retail beauty work, eating disorders, and hair; to a reconsideration of naturalised beauty in architecture, the embodiment of truth as a beautiful women, and what the appearance of Amerindians symbolised for Europeans of the Age of Exploration, culture and identity thread their way through the book. Written by scholars from a range of disciplines that reflect the book’s diversity as well as the complexity of visual beauty itself, Crafting Allure consists of eleven chapters divided into four parts: Fashioning Beauty Cultures, Beauty Workers, Racialising Beauty, and Beauty in Architecture and Allegory