Black Female Hair Creativity/stylisation Presentation

BLACK FEMALE HAIR CREATIVITY/STYLISATION PRESENTATION

Greetings Everyone,

It is indeed an honour to be invited here this afternoon to contribute to your ‘Consumption and Identity Module’ by way of doing a creative presentation that engages with the theme of black female hair creativity/stylisation. By black I am here referring to people of African ancestry, however minute this might be. The consumption practices of black women in relation to hair, and in particular, how they may implicate black female identities is very relevant to your module and an interesting example to engage with because, in the UK, as pointed by the BBC Business Correspondent, Joia Shillingford, on the Net (2nd May 2005 http://news.bbc.co. uk/2/hi/business/4417725.stm), Black African Caribbean women are high consumers of hair-care products and hair stylisation Not only do black women spend, as the French hair and beauty company, L’Oreal, have noted, six times more on hair products than white women but I would add we talk hair in ideological terms big time.

Having fashioned my hair into a variety of aesthetic forms, ranging chronologically from a small-sized Afro, plaits with my own hair or with artificial hair, a curly perm, relaxation, a ‘weave on’ and currently dreadlocks, I have been keen to make intellectual sense over the years of my personal experiences of wearing black-perceived hairstyles. Regardless of hairstyle, it appears that black men and women tend to encounter classifications of our hair texture and certain hair styles into a ‘good/bad’ dichotomy from individuals within and outside black communities in Britain, and other parts of the world. For example, in terms of dreadlocks, hair is often viewed as ‘good’ by those who have bought into constructions of white hair as ‘bad’ and ‘bad’ by those who have conversely bought into constructions of white hair as ‘good’. By white hair here I am referring to the hair of white European/Anglo American hair. Different people attach different meanings to dreadlocks which are often contradictory and conceptually problematic. For example, dreadlocks and hair locking can be associated with the discourse of Rastafari and black beautification, with criminality, or with being, ‘chic’ and fashionable, or with madness, or with being unkempt and so on.

As just mentioned black people tend to talk about hair big time Such discourses on hair or hair talk typically centre around the notion of there being a relationship between hairstyle (especially hair texture) and the politics of black identity which is conceptualised in binary oppositional categories such as ‘straight/nappy’, ‘good/bad’, ‘natural/unnatural’ hair and so on. In 1999, I coined the term ‘hairacialisation’ to depict a process by which hair is placed into a hierarchy of textured types (coolly/nappy, silky European descended hair/coarse African descended hair) and valorised along racial lines. Outside of academic writing and dialogue, very few members in black communities bother to question the moralistic, essentialist and inherently racist assumptions implicit in this dichotomy. What is also of particular interest to me is how, by using the example of black female hair creativity, we can conceptualise the complex ways in which the production and consumption of culture mutually interconnects and implicate social identities and representational practices. Hair, as I aim to show, is very much an embodied phenomenon in which the material and the cultural are inextricably linked. This point will be explored a little later. See article on web by Michael Kwass, The American Histological Review, Big Hair: A Wig History of Consumption in Eighteen Century France, June 2006,Vol, III, No. 3.

Some theoretical links

Before beginning my performance it is a useful starting point to make some brief theoretical links with your module. As you would have noted already, in the past, sociological analyses of cultural products began and ended with the processes of production. Most notably, Frankfurt School theorists, Adorno and Horkheimer, in their critique of mass culture argued that popular culture in its manifold forms i.e. including film, music, television, novels, radio broadcasting, is synonymous with a factory manufacturing ‘standardised’, formulaic and repetitive goods to exploit the masses into passivity. In a nutshell, these writers offer a productionist perspective, in which consumption is flooded and determined by the logic of capitalist production. Consequently, this perspective negates human agency because as far as its advocates are concerned, the needs and desires of consumers are literally created by producers insidiously through advertising and then satisfied by the same producers consumers simply comply and follow a pre-written scri pt like automated robots.

Since Adorno and Horkheimer, a number of consumptionist perspectives have emerged to show how consumption can be understood as an active rather than passive process. Bourdieu’s work represents an important turn towards culture in regarding objects as symbolic and material at once. To summarise he shows how, through the unconscious process of habitus, consumption becomes a differentiated rather than uniform social process. The middle classes and working classes consume their food differently However, while B’s is able to show how class difference is constructed through the consumption of goods, he is unable to explain how consumer practices may penetrate given social divisions to create new identities and difference in the process. Structure seems to constrain ‘agency’.

In its attempt to remedy the pessimism of the production of consumption perspective and the objectivist leanings of the production of consumption as social differentiation, writer’s such as de Certeau suggest that consumption can be seen as ‘production’ in its own right the two processes being inextricably linked. Through acts of ‘appropriation’ consumers attach all kinds of cultural objects with new meanings. Unlike the former approaches, ‘subcultural analysis’ and the more recent ‘Pleasures of Consumption Thesis’ insist on viewing social subjects as active agents who perform a vital role in constructing identities through consumption and the process of bricolage – self –conscious mixing and matching separate elements available, permeating social divisions to produce new cultural identities. The problem is, as critics claim, in their attempt to overcome the problems of the ‘production of consumption’ perspective, consumptionist proponents such as Iain Chambers end up reversing the errors of the earlier approaches, so much so that extreme cultural pessimism and determinism is swapped for extreme populism and voluntarism. Consequently consumption becomes totally dichotomised from production.

However, cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall et al, 1997, drawing on the theoretical and methodological framework of the cultural circuit are at great pains to show that ‘we are not passive victims portrayed by the ‘critique of mass culture’ school nor ‘liberated consumers’ as claimed by the ‘Pleasures of Consumption Thesis’. Somewhere in between there exists ‘creative, active individuals, working with a range of materials, and, through a range of consumption practices, constructing and making sense of everyday life.

Questions to think about:

1. How can we make sense of Black female hairstylisation in terms of the main theories of consumption?

2. How useful are binary oppositional categories in understanding black females identities through hair?

3. Does the theoretical and methodological framework of the cultural circuit help us understand how black women consumption practices in relation to hair?

4. What about the concept of Multi-dimensionality? Shilling’s Theory of Embodiment: hair is a material/cultural phenomenon. Does this approach offer a compromise?

Here are two poems I have written about

Black hair stylisation and how hair per se can be understood as a ‘embodiment experience’.

What are your thoughts on these?

Hair speaks slavery

Strands of soft, silky, curly locks,

Kweku’s hair embodied

Centuries of conversations

Along racial lines,

That unquestionably defined identity

As worthy or unworthy of respect.

By those who erected this hierarchy.

“Oh Gracie, your son has good, coolly hair!

Don’t you dare locks it up, you hear?”

The message was loud and clear.

Slavery had certainly left its mark.

For more than four hundred years,

And few blacks of African descent

With varying textures upon our heads

Would be spared such racist evaluations.

A European comb became a useful tool,

For the enslaver to assess

How more or less black his purchase was.

A comb that combed with much ease

Was sure to please the owner,

Who usually assigned his slave?

A lighter workload.

If Kweku’s silky curly locks

Was seen by some to be positively good,

By implication then my hair,

Locksed and freed up of chemical wares,

Could only be negatively bad,

And even though my hair seemingly fails

To uphold strands of whiteness,

I could not care a less,

Because having ‘nappy hair’ is something

Of which I am glad.

Grace Quansah (aka ‘Akuba’ 1997), December 2007

Dreading Up My Roots

I dreaded the day I ‘locksed’ up my hair’

Knowing that certain folks might stare

But chaa! Do you think I cared?

No more wet look and chemicals,

Weave on, straightening or plastic curls,

Because locksing up is logical!

In common with Rastafarian tradition

I big up my identity as an African

So wearing locks as an ‘ital’ affirmation.

When out shopping I have found

Shop detectives following me around,

Like a pack of blood - thirsty hounds.

Still, my ancestors bounded by chains

Experienced by far greater pains,

So who am I to complain?

For me locksing up

Represents the fact

That I am really proud to be black.

Grace Quansah (aka ‘Akuba’ 1997)