Ariana Grande Brownface: A Successful Rachel Dolezal?
Also similar to Spears and Aguilera, Ariana Grande’s recent image transition involves blackface and brownface to sell her image as a “dangerous woman”, which is also the title of her latest album. Grande rose to fame as an teenager thanks to her involvement with the Nickelodeon, which means as she grows older, there is a demand for her to shed the skin of a white bubblegum pop princess in order to attract more mature audience. One of her most successful video “Side to Side” featuring Nicki Minaj follows quite the same formula set up in “I’m a Slave 4 U” and “Dirrty”: darkening her skin, using exclusively women of color, enlisting a vulgar rapper to point to an unapologetic proclamation of sexuality. Thus, she fits in quite perfectly in the genealogy that I outline above.
However, on top of the evident blackface in “Side to Side”, she takes it further by putting on brownface for her public image in general. The pop star is very carefully ambiguous when addressing her ethnicity, never explicitly saying that she’s white (Italian) but always insisting that she’s half Sicilian and half Abruzzese to play with this racial indeterminacy. In fact, I was not aware of Grande’s practice of brownfacing until I stumbled into a lecture by Dr. Matthew Guterl at Brown University on Ariana Grande and her unexpected role in activism (Guterl quite interestingly argues that her “soft-core self-reflexive sexuality” and racial indeterminacy-impurity has turned her concert into a target by ISIS).
Guterl’s lecture aside, Ariana Grande’s successful and unquestioned practice of brownfacing suggests that she’s not another transracial joke like Rachel Dolezal. Rather, another mode of transraciality materializes as not so much a complete transition from black to white or vice versa, but it relies on ambiguity and ambivalence, on a sort of racial and sexual exotification that sells in pop culture. If race is a social and colonial construct, then the power is still in the hand of white folks who get to play with and reconstruct their own racial reality to their own advantage.
Ariana Grande Brownface: A Successful Rachel Dolezal?