Beauty Diplomacy
Award Winner
2021: Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize for Best Scholarly Work
Winner of the 2021 Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize for Best Scholarly Work, sponsored by the Women's Caucus of the African Studies Association (ASA).2020: Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title
Winner of the 2020 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title, sponsored by the American Library Association.
Even as beauty pageants have been critiqued as misogynistic and dated cultural vestiges of the past in the US and elsewhere, the pageant industry is growing in popularity across the Global South, and Nigeria is one of the countries at the forefront of this trend. In a country with over 1,000 reported pageants, these events are more than superficial forms of entertainment. Beauty Diplomacy takes us inside the world of Nigerian beauty contests to see how they are transformed into contested vehicles for promoting complex ideas about gender and power, ethnicity and belonging, and a rapidly changing articulation of Nigerian nationhood. Drawing on four case studies of beauty pageants, this book examines how Nigeria's changing position in the global political economy and existing cultural tensions inform varied forms of embodied nationalism, where contestants are expected to integrate recognizable elements of Nigerian cultural identity while also conveying a narrative of a newly-emerging, globally-relevant Nigeria. Oluwakemi M. Balogun critically examines Nigerian pageants in the context of major transitions within the nation-state, using these events as a lens through which to understand Nigerian national identity and international relations.
"It's one thing to describe beauty practices and place them in historical context. It's quite another, bigger challenge to show how these practices embody disputes over national identity, culture, and economic development. Combining deep knowledge of Nigerian society with rich, painstaking field research, Dr. Balogun's book is the best I've read on the intersection of postcolonial nationalism, globalization, and bodies."—Erynn Masi de Casanova, University of Cincinnati, and co-editor of Bodies without Borders and Global Beauty, Local Bodies
"In Beauty Diplomacy, Balogun argues that beauty pageants are not benign; rather, they are arenas in which young women are trained, transformed, and deployed as beauty diplomats—forging ties among Nigerian businessmen and politicians, embodying nationalism, and serving as cultural ambassadors tasked with repairing the nation's reputation on the global stage. This clearly written and conceptually innovative book is a significant achievement."—Sanyu A. Mojola, author of Love, Money, and HIV: Becoming a Modern African Woman in the Age of AIDS
"Compellingly, Balogun uses the framework of global nationalism to describe the ways in which pageant organizers and participants navigate between constructing and embracing new forms of Nigerian nationhood....This engagingly written volume, of accessible length, should be read by academics at all levels, but will be a particularly excellent selection for advanced undergraduate courses in African studies and related fields. Highly recommended."—E. E. Stiles, CHOICE
"Oluwakemi M. Balogun's Beauty Diplomacy is a rich sociological study of the strategic role beauty pageants play when developing countries try to elevate their status as an emerging economy in the global neoliberal order."—Jaita Talukdar, American Journal of Sociology
"It can be challenging to trace how abstract concepts like globalization or nationalism appear in everyday life. But beauty pageants are an excellent site to explore cultural meaning-making.Beauty Diplomacyis a welcome addition to scholarship in global and transnational sociology as well as sociology of the body, embodiment, and gender."—Alka Menon, Contemporary Sociology
"Beauty Diplomacy is an important contribution to the literature on gender, Nigerian political economy, nationalism and nation-building, women's bodies and sexuality, transnational feminist sociology, international relations, and neoliberal globalization."—Gloria Chuku, International Journal of African Historical Studies
