UC San Diego

This dissertation argues that Afrodiasporic writers imagine Africa as global through the hair salon. In my reading of Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019), Tendai Huchu’s The Hairdresser of Harare (2010), Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah (2013) and Rosine Mbakam’s Chez Jolie Coiffure (2018), I analyze the hair salon as a contact zone where people of varied backgrounds converge, diverge, and intersect to examine how factors such as race, ethnicity, gender, class, and nationality influence community building. While much tension occurs during close encounters as social forces control the voices and thinking of those navigating the hair salon, hairdressing a discursive, interactive, and process-oriented practice smooths the striated space through proximity, intimacy, and affect. To show the effect of hairdressing on the social relations being forged in the space of the hair salon, I perform close analysis on how the figure of the hairdressers uses their hands, their tools, and the power of storytelling. As a result, this dissertation uses body language and storytelling as African and Feminist methodological approaches. Through an analysis of the interplay between the hair salon and hairdressing, I show how contemporary African writers of the diaspora create communities that are under constant construction where power dynamics are produced, reproduced, and transformed, ultimately weaving diverse stories into each community’s narrative. This weaving registers in the narrative form, creating multivocal narratives in content and form. Through the hair salon, Afrodiasporic writers disrupt the close association between narrative and nation and establish an association between narrative and place, allowing for an exploration of how the individuals relate or not to the nation and by extension to the world; a shift that envisions Africa as global without jeopardizing a sense of place.