Reading Hair: Untangling Literary Representation and Cultural Practice in African American Women’s Writing (1929-1976)

This thesis investigates the role of twentieth-century African American literature and contextualises the contemporary interest in Black hair and the role that literary hair enjoys within recent publications. Through a multidisciplinary lens encompassing sociological, anthropological, and academic research, the project recognises how Black hair embodies complex realities of identity, agency, and resistance within African American women's gendered and racialised experiences. However, a key revelation emerges from this examination; despite critical scholarship attributing an autonomous language, rhetoric, and grammar to hair, modernist studies have neglected the integral contribution of literary representations of hair in shaping the discursive and corporeal dynamics of African American women’s lives. This thesis argues that African American women writers during the early twentieth century were already engaging with the significance of hair through the medium of literary representation and practice – an embodied investment that extended across subsequent years. Through a comprehensive analysis of the works authored by African American women, this project meticulously unravels the complexities intrinsic to the racialised female body. In conversation with the critical lens of hair studies, this research pioneers the first literary mapping of African American hair. Intersecting the critical perspectives of hair studies with those of literary analysis, this research examines the influence of material culture, hair care advertisements, and dominant beauty aesthetics in shaping the narrative of Black hair. This convergence extends beyond the Afro-centric focus to embrace the role of Black hair in shaping New Negro identity, embodying female trauma, symbolising initiation into womanhood, and emerging as a site of feminine empowerment and resistance against the prevailing forces of gendered and racialised assimilation. Strategically framing the research within two watershed moments in African American cultural history - the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro Movement in the 1920s and the Black Power Movement in the 1970s – this project examines the dynamic nature of Black hair within the broader African American cultural narrative. Furthermore, this study acknowledges that hair symbolism in North America constitutes a “fluid process” (Synnott 410), evolving in response to shifting ideologies and fashion trends that profoundly influence individual and collective perspectives, fostering dynamic social change. The temporal trajectory of this project serves as a counterpoint to the inadequacy of confining Black hair to a simplistic political emblem or a mere reflection of self-perception. Moreover, this exploration resonates with the acknowledgement that race is performative (Ehlers 6), manifesting through phenotypic differences, where hair emerges as a crucial racial marker perpetuating and enacting racial disparities through its embodiment. Leveraging this knowledge alongside material cultural insights, this project weaves these elements into the narrative fabric of fictional works authored by Black women. Ultimately, the research project triumphantly unveils the intricate mosaic of African American cultural life that not only shapes but is, in turn, distinctly shaped by Black hair. The culmination of this inquiry extends the scope of scholarly discourse, resonating in the contextualisation of the present-day preoccupation with Black hair across a spectrum of media and social platforms. My project unequivocally establishes that fiction writers of twentieth-century modernist literature possessed insights that eluded hair scholars. This further underscores my project’s focus on the earlier formative period to analyse the evolution of the relationship between language and Black hair.