ABSTRACT
This chapter theorizes and grounds the concept of recuperative whiteness as it pertains to the contemporary notion of anti-ageing wellness by linking these concepts to the literature on nineteenth-century German Romantics, British colonial medicine on race and tropical diseases and to the ecological discourse of the myth of the Canadian Great White North. The aim of this historically grounded sociological analysis is to reveal the historical roots of contemporary marketing of products which associate skin-whitening and anti-ageing with recuperative wellness. The second aim is to situate contemporary promotion of anti-ageing whiteness and global promotion of skin-whitening to colonial-era environmental determinism and reveal how the European colonial-era belief in recuperative whiteness and the ‘benefits’ of living in colder climates shaped colonial thinking in wide-ranging areas such as the medical understating of the causes and cures of communicable diseases and racial degeneration. This historical review is necessary to reveal how contemporary marketing of anti-ageing and skin-whitening discourse, practice and marketing strategies for these products have rebranded the trope of recuperative whiteness as a means of reversing the process of ageing in women, and middle-aged white women in particular, and the promotion of a global diffusion of whiteness.
