The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization

by The Modern Girl Around the World Research Group. Alys Eve. Weinbaum, Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, Madeleine Yue Dong, and Tani E. Barlow, Editors
Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2008
448 pp. illus. 132 b/w. Trade, $89.99; paper, $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4299-1; ISBN: 978-0-8223-4305-9.

Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg

jzilberg(at)illinois.edu

The Modern Girl Around the World is a fabulous book about the simultaneous emergence of the Modern Girl phenomenon globally. From an account of Madame C, J. Walker's cosmetics company and the "New Negro Movement" of the early 20 th Century in the US to the analysis of the phenomenon in the 1920's and 1930's in Africa, India, China and Japan, from "Blackfella Missus" in Australia to Bolshevic moralist rejection of the flapper, from the Neue Frauen of the Weimar and Nazi eras to "girls lean back everywhere" especially in France, it is a simply fabulous academic conjunction of history and cultural criticism. The trans-disciplinary reach of the historical analyses and the sustained intellectual dynamic informing and connecting each chapter makes this an enormously significant and fascinating body of work.

The research group was initially formed in 2000 at the University of Washington in Seattle and substantially added to by a Tokyo-based group "The Modern Girl and Colonial Modernity in East Asia", this book being the outcome of both groups coming together in 2004 in Japan. The collective was inspired by the work of two historians in particular amongst others, the late Miriam Silverberg and the inimitable Timothy Burke. While Silverberg was chosen as the first invited speaker because of her all important work on gender and modernity in Japan in the inter-war years, of the many subsequent speakers, not all of whom contributed to the volume, it is the work of Timothy Burke that appears to have had the strongest influence of all. His path breaking study Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (1996) is as important to this collective study as Silverberg's work and perhaps even more so because of the combination of his powerful theoretical acuity and combination of fieldwork and historical research into what was at the time, certainly for Africa, completely un-chartered territory.

The concept of the Modern Girl is used here as a heuristic device that is eminently useful for exploring what it meant and means to be "modern", specifically in terms of visuality and self-fashioning through commodity consumption. One of the study's central concerns is to de-center the notion that modernity is purely Western as each chapter differently relates in very different contexts whilst being careful to distinguish between the periods before and after World War Two. Above all, Chapter 2, "The Modern Girl Around the World: Cosmetics Advertising and the Politics of Race and Style", is foundational in the sense that it is collectively written and clearly lays out the essential parameters of the project and its theoretical claims.

Here, in this critical chapter, through analyzing advertisements from four continents and from a range of print media and languages, the group defines their methodology as "connective comparison" - "a method which allows us to identify connections among disparate locales and to explore the overlap and distinction among Modern Girl representations . . .   ." (p. 26).   This also enabled the authors to identify local aesthetic and stylistic peculiarities and the "citation" of these across contexts such as an Asianised art deco derived aesthetic, one instance of "multidirectional citation", that is, "the mutual, though non-equivalent influences and circuits of exchange" that shaped and transformed the Modern Girl around the world (ibid.). Though this method and theory is elegant enough and no doubt well supported it will be interesting to follow the degree to which these two ideas, connective comparison and multi-directional citation achieve any sustained theoretical currency in the diverse literatures for which this collection has such broad relevance and application.

What stands out across these mainly historical studies is the degree to which wherever the Modern Girl appeared she was always associated with romantic love, dating and premarital sex and as such posed a threat to tradition and authority. And yet it will be striking perhaps for some to contrast the emotional intensity of that and the visceral creative pleasure of consumption and self-fashioning with the largely joyless critical analyses presented here. The unfortunate result is that the study for some will come across as extremely anodyne if always complex and critical. For others, it evokes rage and sadness .[1]

This anodyne quality is a result of a forthright approach as the introductory chapter concludes. There the authors explain their analytic tactic as such:

"[it] resists assessment of consumption as positive or negative, oppressive or liberatory, and instead emphasizes how commodity advertising and consumption were productive of the Modern Girl as both representational strategy and social agent formed in and through early processes of gendered globalization." (p. 22)

Keeping this analytic position foremost in mind, one should perhaps best begin by reading Burke's chapter, essentially the epilogue.

To begin with, Burke notes that the term modernity is a word "now used with near-meaningless abandon . . ." (p. 363), hence the turn to "multiple modernities" and their contextualization as so well provided in this study. However, note his caution: "the emancipatory value of both modernity and capitalism have been systematically underrated by a generation's worth of scholarship which dedicated itself, often appropriately, to correcting colonial ideology and capitalist mythmaking" (p. 363). And furthermore note this: "Historians obsessed with refuting colonial ideology have managed to overlook the degree to which some women adopted wickedness with considerable enthusiasm" (p. 365) never mind might one add the enthusiasm of using beauty products and fashion to make themselves "beautiful". Burke also adds the important caveat that the notion that desire and consumption are trivial expressions of liberty has its origins in the Enlightenment's ambivalence over liberty, discipline, and indulgence, in this case that women are acting rather than self-fashioning. The consequences are not insignificant.

Burke is, it seems, asking for something more in future scholarship, perhaps something that gets closer to the consumers' personal experience, maybe more sensuous, more joyful and less judgmental. To get there will require an ethnographic turn, a shift in emphasis so as to more sensitively appreciate how the modern girl enjoyed and empowered herself, and continues to do so. That can arguably only be achieved without the over-determining burden of the edgy emphasis on race and gender as battle zones in which savvy sexist racist advertisers and companies are simply making money out of manipulating "false" dreams, desires and aspirations. In this, feminist fracture lines course through this study and the emerging reactions to it. And there, in college classes on gender, Alys Weinbaum's contribution "Racial Masquerade: Consumption and Contestation of American Identity" will be a very fine place to start especially considering the iconic significance and recognition Man Ray's photograph "Blanche et Noire" first published in Vogue in 1929 has assumed over the intervening decades as for how it serves as symbolic in a sense for the arguments made throughout the study.

Burke ends by reminding us that the Modern Girl's most significant agency, her power to express her desires and identity has been sometimes solely achievable through the consumption of commodities in the capitalist marketplace. Surely this is a caution against the endemic quality underlying much of the discussions in this book that the Modern Girl is being duped by advertising rather than empowered by it. In this, despite the very great strengths of this book, and perhaps as a direct result of its critical analytic distance, it lacks the very qualities that make the Modern Girl so dangerously alluring and oftentimes empowered. That being said, The Modern Girl Around the World is a fabulous study in every respect and it will be of very great use value for years to come, especially for adding complexities to debates over the nexus of Americanization, globalization and hybridity in the all important context of the consumption and self-fashioning.

References:

[1] See Mary Evans, "Women should go shopping", The Times Higher Education , June 11, 2009, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=406904.