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

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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.