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

该项目旨在通过关注头发和黑人妇女沙龙的大部分无证历史来恢复英国黑人散居经历的隐藏历史。黑人发廊，无论是正式的商业街机构，还是位于卧室和厨房，都是黑人社交的私密场所。在这些空间里，黑人女性通过头发创造性地制作拒绝和与美，性和女性气质的规范观念进行谈判。与黑人美发沙龙合作是为了认识到通过奴隶制，帝国和此后移民到英国的历史。当加勒比黑人妇女第一次在英国定居时，他们的头发护理需求没有得到主流欧洲理发师的满足。他们在厨房和卧室里建立了临时沙龙。这些即兴沙龙在为社区行动主义、关怀和抵抗提供空间的同时，突出了更广泛的边缘化。最近，通过各种非洲移民浪潮（如西非和加勒比海），来自不同后殖民国家的妇女给伦敦带来了各种各样的触觉记忆和创造性的发型。这项研究提供了一个黑人女权主义者的干预，反对占主导地位的档案，沉默了黑人妇女的故事。将沙龙视为黑人散居生活的多感官档案，社交的亲密场所和体现知识的外围枢纽，它为重新想象我们的历史和未来提供了可能性。该项目结合了沙龙业主及其客户的代际和散居地内的叙述，汇集了一个关于护发、讲故事和倾听如何在护理头发时融合在一起的亲密档案。为了与更广泛的受众分享这项研究，我将制作感官和体验输出（例如音景），数字档案和文本材料。这些方法是一种创造性的人类学方法，为英国黑人生活的结构化阅读开辟了空间。

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.