The urban landscape in which we live both shapes and is shaped by our everyday actions and, crucially, the bodies that carry out those actions. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the super-diverse city of London. In the city, where over 300 languages are spoken in schools, where some of the most deprived areas neighbour some of the wealthiest and where great swathes of former social housing is being regenerated and, in some cases, gentrified, this diversity is visible in the markets, the restaurants and cafés and the places of worship, in the clothes that we wear, in the newspapers we read and where we go to get our hair done.

Thursday 10 July 2014

The hair salons/shops of Lewisham. Part 2

I hope these next images are large enough to show the detail of the shop windows. They display everything from hair straighteners to wigs, from different shampoos, conditioners and natural oils to silk scarves. Also those multi-coloured nets that I see hanging up outside every Afro-European hair shop, what are they used for?



As a white woman who shampoos and blow dries my hair twice a week and ties it up in a ponytail, many of the products in the Afro-European hair shops remain a complete mystery to me. In the documentary film Good Hair, Chris Rock examines the amount of time, money and effort spent by black women on styling their hair; that is spent trying to get 'good hair': straight, European-style hair.

The very idea that there is 'good hair' (and, thus, by definition 'bad hair') underlines Eurocentric ideals of beauty: straight blond hair and blue eyes (in Toni Morrison's 1990 novel The Bluest Eye, Pecola wishes for blue eyes to overcome her blackness and to become beautiful). However notions of beauty are not monolithic, they are socially constructed, socially defined and hold political power.

Thinking about hair and beauty products and practices is one way to consider how the material fabric of the urban landscape and the bodies that occupy it are marked by the inheritance of imperialism. The products available in these shops serve as a reminder not only of London's everyday diversity but also of Britain's imperialist history, its racist discourse and its power relations which are, in turn, inscribed onto (certain) bodies and woven into their hair.
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