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One British Thing: The Hair Weavers Text-Book: A Study in the Art of Hair-Weaving and Beauty Culture (1967)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2021

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Abstract

As part of the “One British Thing” series, this essay explores Ena V. McDonald's The Hair Weavers Text-Book, published in 1967, as a source for exploring Black women's intellectual histories in Britain during the twentieth century.

Type
Original Manuscript
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 60 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 169 - 172
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies, 2021

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References

1 Key recent works in the field include Adi, Hakim, ed., Black British History: New Perspectives (London, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Connell, Kieran, Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain (Berkeley, 2019)Google Scholar; Waters, Rob, Thinking Black: Britain, 1964–1985 (Berkeley, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nubia, Onyeka, England's Other Countrymen: Black Tudor Society (London, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 On the concept of the infra-ordinary and the importance of analyzing aspects of the mundane and everyday worlds of sociohistorical subjects, see Perec, Georges, Species of Space and Other Pieces, ed. and trans. Sturrock, John (New York, 1997)Google Scholar.

3 For example, Bryan, Beverley, Dadzie, Stella, and Scafe, Suzanne, The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain (London, 1985)Google Scholar; Sherwood, Marika, Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile (London, 2000)Google Scholar; Davies, Carole Boyce, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, 2008)Google Scholar; Ford, Tanisha C., Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Umoren, Imaobong, Race Women Internationalists: Activists-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles (Berkeley, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Newman, Jon, “Harry Jacobs: The Studio Photographer and the Visual Archive,” in People and Their Pasts: Public History Today, ed. Ashton, Paul and Kean, Hilda (London, 2009), 260–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 McDonald, Ena V., The Hair Weavers Text-Book: A Study in the Art of Hair-Weaving and Beauty Culture (London, 1967)Google Scholar.

6 McDonald, The Hair Weavers Text-Book, 5.

7 See Tulloch, Carol, The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora (London, 2016), 4–5, 171–98Google Scholar.

8 McDonald, The Hair Weavers Text-Book, 5, 7, 10.

9 Mercer, Kobena, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York, 1994), chap. 4Google Scholar.

10 McDonald, The Hair Weavers Text-Book, 5.

11 McDonald, 7.

12 Harris, Clive, “Post-war Migration and the Industrial Reserve Army,” in Inside Babylon: The Caribbean Diaspora in Britain, ed. James, Winston and Harris, Clive (London 1993), 9–54Google Scholar; see also Bryan, Dadzie, and Scafe, The Heart of the Race, 19–57.

13 McDonald, The Hair Weavers Text-Book, 11–12, 41.

14 McDonald, 45; W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York, 1994), 2–3. On the relevance of this term as a conceptual device for understanding Black Britain, see also Gilroy, Paul, Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London, 1993), chap 1Google Scholar.

15 McDonald, The Hair Weavers Text-Book, 47.

16 McDonald, 12.

17 McDonald, 5; Tate, Shirley Anne, Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization and Politics (London, 2016), 148CrossRefGoogle Scholar.