To Exist Serially: Black Radical Magazines and Beauty Culture, 1917–1919

This article traces connections between black beauty culture and early issues of The Messenger and the Negro World by attending to two interdependent dimensions of seriality: first, its function as a mode of continuity and, second, its role as a technique of repetition that shapes subjects and groups. Analyzing these two forms of seriality illuminates how these magazines' serial methods for cultivating black radical individuals and communities depended upon and responded to the advertisements and discussions of black beauty culture that appeared in their pages. Madam C. J. Walker's business empire in particular represented alternative approaches to subject formation and continuity via consumption, education, and activism.