Research in African Literatures

ABSTRACT:

Americanah (2013) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie brought to the forefront the natural hair movement as a form of resistance to Western aesthetics. However, this conversation overlooks the labor that goes into creating Africentric hairstyles. In this essay, I examine what hair signifies for immigrant hairstylists in order to articulate a cosmopolitan experience from the perspective of the racialized, gendered, and undocumented migrant worker. To understand how these migrants find belonging in the world, I argue against the abstraction of space, a predominant tendency in invocations of cosmopolitanism and its related strand, Afropolitanism. With that in mind, I look at the hair salon, a highly gendered and stratified space that reveals not only how the female workers are placed in a restrictive position, but also how they shape the space that they occupy through their service of braiding hair. I juxtapose this service and cultural act alongside Achille Mbembe's concept of interweaving worlds to show that the female migrant workers interweave divergent perspectives despite the disharmonious encounters produced by the invisible racial, ethnic, and class boundaries of the hair salon.