Black hair culture, politics and change

Abstract

Since the period of black enslavement in the Americas, Diaspora people have used their bodies as a canvas on which to articulate their presence as subjects. This propensity to use the body as a key medium of creative and political expression emerged from an amalgam of African retentions and new, grounded syncretisms in the West. It was further influenced by their denial of access to the academies and cultural institutions such as music halls, galleries, theatres, museums and even clubs. But more than an embodied locus of creativity, the black body has been a site of political struggle since the antebellum period. Whether generated by an oppressor who sought to condition the black subject for labour by inflicting pain on his/her body or driven by the conflicts within some black subjects for physiognomic valuation, the body of the diasporic settler has been and remains a key site of political contestation. This paper will explore these two themes through the medium of black hair culture. In the process, it will look at the centrality of hair to diasporic aesthetics and hair as a symbol of black resistance to oppression. In doing so, it offers students and educationalists with an interest in issues‐based enquiry in art and design education a pathway to project development with a focus on hair culture that could be developed in a variety of media, while opening up avenues for dialogue that should enhance understanding.

Notes

1. The term ‘Diaspora’ is used to refer to those people of largely African ancestry in the West who are the direct descendants of slaves.

2. Conking is a form of styling in which the hair is treated with lye or other chemicals to straighten it artificially. The process is often painful and can damage the skin. When completed, a conk can last for several weeks if properly maintained. Hair straightened in this way can acquire the temporary glossy sheen favoured by many wearers.

3. For the INIVA website, which features Sonia Boyce’s Do You Want to Touch?, see http://www.iniva.org/archive/resource/402

4. Atkinson (2002, p. 104) postulates that ‘Foucault’s integration of power‐knowledge invokes the idea that the acquisition, transmission or use of knowledge … implicate different forms of power’. I am using this theory to reference the patronage implicit to some filmic and literary creations including the character Farino, in which the black subject is depicted in a less than complementary way by members of the white hegemony who think they know the Negro and have, by this knowledge, the authority to represent them.

5. For Joy Gregory’s Blonde, see http://www.iniva.org/archive/resource/141.