Martha Gonzalez
Comm. 597
Professors Leilani Nishime and Ralina Joseph
May 11, 2009
Black Hair/Style Politics
Mercer, Kobena. “Black Hair/Style Politics.” In Welcome to the jungle: new positions in Black cultural
studies. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Kobena Mercer’s intellectual project interrogates the cultural politics of beauty, style and fashion. Mercer specifically looks at hairstyles in African-American culture. She does a historical reading on how the economic, political, and psychological are imbedded in the “art form” of African-American hairstyles and how they are all “aesthetic solutions” to a, “range of ‘problems’ created by ideologies of race and racism.”(100)
“ . . . hair is merely a raw material, constantly processed by cultural practices which thus invests it with meanings and value.” (101)
The Fixity of OTHER:
Edward Said’s statement on naturalizing ‘knowledge’:
“There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated it is instrumental it is pervasive; it has status, it establishes cannons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true and from traditions, perceptions and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces.”(19)
“Classical ideologies of race established a classificatory symbolic system of color, with white and black signifiers of a fundamental polarization of human worth--” (102)
Superiority Inferiority
White Black
Aesthetic Value:
Beautiful Ugly
- Europe and scientific racism: “the ordering of differences constructed a regime of truth . . .” (102)
- Imperial Eyes by Mary Louise Pratt: La Condamines, Carl Linne, “global classificatory project” (27)
-Race articulations in 19th century popular culture (minstrel stereotypes, Sambo, Gollywog etc.)
-Pigmentocracy: a division of labor based on racial hierarchy.
“African elements-be they cultural or physical-are devalued as indices of low social status, while European elements are positively valorized as attributes enabling upward mobility” (103)
Hair as symbolic material/Ethnic signifier
-Anti-straightening arguments-
“Diseased state of black consciousness” (97)
“becoming white” (98),
“psychologically mutilated black consciousness.” (98)
on the other hand. . .
-Both Afros and Dreds invoke:
“nature” to inscribe Africa as symbol of political opposition to the hegemony of the west.” “Ideologically ‘right on’’” (108)
“Both these hairstyles were never just natural, waiting to be found: they were stylistically cultivated and politically constructed in a particular historical moment as part of a strategic contestation of white dominance and the cultural power of whiteness.” (108)
“I suggest that when hairstyling is critically evaluated as an aesthetic practice inscribed in everyday life, all black hair-styles are political in that they each articulated responses to the panoply of historical forces which have invested this element of the ethnic signifier with both social and symbolic meaning and significance.” (104)
Questions:
In what ways is Mercer’s intellectual project on black hair a post-colonial discourse?
Where is as Homi K. Bhabha would cite the, “point of intervention” in Mercer’s discourse?
Does Spike Lee’s “Good and Bad Hair” re-inscribe or counter the “fetish” Bhabha speaks of?
You tube movies to check out:
“Good and Bad Hair” School Daze
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtfEmTHeYNw
“Samuel L . Jackson on being a Black College Student” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNOfAFUT4xU
“Hair Song”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dyl0j3WU6Y&NR=1
Related Readings Bibliography:
Brady, Mary. 2002. Extinct lands, temporal geographies: Chicana literature and the urgency of
space. Durham: Duke University Press.
Brooks, Daphne. 2006. Bodies in dissent : spectacular performances of race and freedom, 1850
1910. Durham: Duke University Press.
Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books.
Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the oppressed. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota
Press.
Tate, Greg. 2003. Everything but the burden: what white people are taking from Black culture.
1st ed. New York: Broadway Book
Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as social life: the politics of participation. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.