“They like using girls like me, light skin girls”: Music videos, race, and technology in Accra, Ghana

Using the casting of women models as a case study, this paper employs Caldwell’s notion of “industrial self-theorizing” to examine how light skin valorization was reproduced and contested in the Ghanaian hip-hop music video industry during the late 2010s. The 2010s were marked by global and national conversations about light skin valorization and cinematographic practices, such as the lighting of dark skin tones. The paper also adopts a materialist media approach that is attentive to how representational practices and social context are articulated in relation to visual technologies. Following Dyer, I am also interested in production practices that influence the technological construction of beauty and the valorization of light skin. The industry’s self-theorizing at the time attributed light skin tone preferences in the music video scene to two main causes: the technical construction of beauty, rooted in perceptions about skin tone biases in imported visual technologies, and a commodified construction of beauty, which markets beauty to align with societal cultural preferences. Understanding visual technologies and the valorization of light skin helps us examine how casting choices based on skin tones reflect local beauty standards, and also how the negotiated use of video technologies and attendant conventions function.