Tangled subjectivities: African hair braiding and nonfigurative media

Abstract

Interest in the social and cultural significance of sub-saharan African hairstyles such as cornrows, box braids, and bantu knots has enjoyed a resurgence (Edwards, 2020). Although it has historically been dismissed as a frivolous site of study, there exists scholarship invested in understanding hair as more than a “dead margin of the self” (Kwint et al., 1999, p. 9; Thrift, 2008) in order to focus on the cultural and social significance of hair (see Bradford et al., 2019; Byrd & Tharps, 2014; Holton, 2020; Kwint et al., 1999; Omotoso, 2015, 2018; Rosado, 2003; Watson, 2010; Weitz, 2004). The renewed popularity of this kind of scholarship has been accompanied by an increased interest in the relationship between African hairstyles, racialization, and cultural identity. Similarly, there have been subdued but nonetheless important attempts in the fields of computer science, ethnocomputing, and ethnomathematics to study how indigenous cultural practices such as hair braiding can be used to situate Black cosmetologists and hair braiders as STEM experts in their own right (Lachney et al, 2020). This paper argues that African hair braiding relies on the transmission of cultural and ethnomathematical knowledges that while nonfigurative and abstract continue to animate diasporic ontologies and epistemologies. Furthermore, I argue that African hair braiding as it is practiced throughout the Black diaspora allows diasporic subjects to negotiate their being in the world by interacting with a medium which has historically been rife with meaning. This paper highlights the relationship between ethnomathematics, ethnocomputing and social and cultural phenomena. This paper positions African hair braiding as a mode of mediation that exists within a larger media ecology consisting of social, spiritual, and communicative practices that have emerged (and re-emerge) both on the African continent and throughout the diaspora by mobilizing the unconscious for moments of diasporic transindividuation.