ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of India’s Dark Is Beautiful (DISB) campaign as emblematic of feminist campaigns to combat colorism in South Asia through a humanitarian discourse of democratization-through-beauty. “Dark Is Beautiful” riffs off of “Black is Beautiful,” an expression of Afro-centric political pride during the global Black freedom movement of 1960s and 1970s. However, this article argues that DISB cannot approximate the oppositional politics of “Black is Beautiful” because of its rootedness in a liberal humanitarian discourse of women’s empowerment, rather than in a radically transformative vision of anti-nationalist and anti-racist solidarity. Humanitarian campaigns like DISB fail sufficiently to address the connections between colorism and race- and caste-based hierarchies in its pronouncements of “dark is beautiful.”
