Hair Biographies: The Intimate Archives of Black Women's Hair Salons

头发传记：黑人女性美发沙龙的私密档案

• 批准号: 2605089
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Goldsmiths University of London
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2021 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2605089
• 关键词: Hair; Biographies; Intimate; Archives; Black

This project aims to recover hidden histories of Black diasporic experience in Britain through a focus on hair and the largely undocumented history of Black women's salons. Black hair salons whether formal high street establishments or located in bedrooms and kitchens are intimate sites of Black sociality. These are spaces where Black women creatively craft refusals and negotiations with normative ideas of beauty, sexuality and femininity through the medium of hair.To engage with Black hair salons is to recognise the histories of migration to Britain through slavery, empire and thereafter. When Afro-Caribbean women first settled in Britain, their hair-care needs were not met by mainstream European hairdressers. They created makeshift salons in kitchens and bedrooms. While providing space for community activism, care and resistance these impromptu salons highlighted broader marginalisation. More recently, through various waves of Afro-diasporic migration (eg.West African and Caribbean), women from different post-colonial nations have brought to London varied tactile memories and creative hair practices. This research offers a Black feminist intervention that counters dominant archives that have silenced Black women's stories. Treating salons as multi-sensorial archives of Black diasporic life, intimate sites of sociality and peripheralised hubs of embodied knowledge, it offers possibilities for reimagining our histories and futures. Combining inter-generational and intra-diasporic narratives of salon owners and their clients, the project assembles an intimate archive of how hair care, storytelling, and listening merge while tending to hair. For a reflexive and engaged sharing of this research with wider audiences, I will produce sensory and experiential outputs (e.g. soundscapes), digital archives, and textual material. These methods are a creative means of doing anthropology that open space for textured readings of Black life in Britain.

该项目旨在通过关注头发和黑人女性沙龙的大部分未被记录的历史，恢复英国黑人流散经历的隐藏历史。黑人发廊，无论是正式的商业街，还是位于卧室和厨房，都是黑人社交的亲密场所。在这些空间里，黑人女性通过头发的媒介创造性地拒绝和协商关于美、性和女性气质的规范观念。与黑人美发沙龙打交道，就是要认识到英国从奴隶制、帝国统治到后来的移民历史。当非裔加勒比女性第一次在英国定居时，她们的护发需求并没有得到主流欧洲美发师的满足。他们在厨房和卧室里创建了临时沙龙。在为社区活动、关怀和抵抗提供空间的同时，这些即兴沙龙凸显了更广泛的边缘化。最近，通过各种非洲移民浪潮(例如：西非和加勒比地区)，来自不同后殖民国家的女性给伦敦带来了不同的触觉记忆和创造性的发型实践。这项研究提供了一种黑人女权主义干预，以对抗压制黑人女性故事的主流档案。将沙龙视为黑人流散生活的多感官档案，亲密的社交场所和具体化知识的外围中心，它为重新想象我们的历史和未来提供了可能性。该项目结合了沙龙老板及其客户的代际和内部故事，汇集了一个亲密的档案，展示了头发护理、讲故事和倾听如何在护理头发时融合在一起。为了与更广泛的受众进行反思和参与分享，我将制作感官和体验输出（例如声景）、数字档案和文本材料。这些方法是研究人类学的一种创造性方法，为深入解读英国黑人生活开辟了空间。