Paul Dash

Black hair culture, politics and change

Since the period of black enslavement in the Americas, Diaspora people have used their bodies as a canvas on which to articulate their presence as subjects. This propensity to use the body as a key medium of creative and political expression emerged from an amalgam of African retentions and new, grounded syncretisms in the West. It was further influenced by their denial of access to the academies and cultural institutions such as music halls, galleries, theatres, museums and even clubs. But more than an embodied locus of creativity, the black body has been a site of political struggle since the antebellum period. Whether generated by an oppressor who sought to condition the black subject for labour by inflicting pain on his/her body or driven by the conflicts within some black subjects for physiognomic valuation, the body of the diasporic settler has been and remains a key site of political contestation. This paper will explore these two themes through the medium of black hair culture. In the process, it will look at the centrality of hair to diasporic aesthetics and hair as a symbol of black resistance to oppression. In doing so, it offers students and educationalists with an interest in issues‐based enquiry in art and design education a pathway to project development with a focus on hair culture that could be developed in a variety of media, while opening up avenues for dialogue that should enhance understanding.

Thoughts on a Relevant Art Curriculum for the 21st Century

We have something in photography that is called a zone system . . . the zone system is completely constructed around what makes white people look best. It is our system and our theory – photo theory – for understanding what a good print is, and it is based on white skin. So the very base of photography and the way that photography has been developed in the West as a science, because that’s what most of it is, is based on ideas of whiteness. What would have happened, for instance, if photography, had been developed in Japan? The images would look very different, and what is theoretically impossible or even practically acceptable would be very, very different as well. [Carrie Mae Weems in conversation with bell hooks, Art on my Mind. pp. 91–92] We face as a nation the deep, profoundly perturbed and perturbing question of our relationship to others – other cultures, states, histories, experiences, traditions, peoples, destinies. There is no Archimedian point beyond the question from which to answer it; there is no advantage outside the actuality of relationships among cultures, among us and others; no one has the epistemological privilege of somehow judging, evaluating, and interpreting the world free from the encumbering interests and engagements of the ongoing relationships themselves. [Ibid. p. 65]