Description: Prove It On Me explores the sexual politics of the modern racial ethos and reveals the exploitative underside of the New Negro era. Analyzing intersecting primitivism, consumerism, and New Negro patriarchal aspirations, this history investigates the uses made of black women in 1920s racial politics and popular culture.
Review Quotes: "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....[T]his text will become a canonical study of black women's cultural history in many years to come."--Callaloo