From the Kitchen to the Parlor: Language and Becoming in African American Women’s Hair Care
Product DescriptionWhen is hair “just hair” and when is it not “just hair”? Documenting the politics of African American women’s hair, this multi-sited linguistic ethnography explores everyday interaction in beauty parlors, Internet discussions, comedy clubs, and other contexts to illuminate how and why hair matters in African American women’s day-to-day experiences. . . . More >>
From the Kitchen to the Parlor: Language and Becoming in African American Women’s Hair Care
I’ll preface my review by saying that I am definitely not the intended audience for this book. I was forced to buy it when I took a class by the author, Lanita Jacobs-Huey, who is a professor at USC. Her class was called “Understanding Culture Through Film,” which sounded interesting. As it turns out, she devoted almost the entire class to ranting about black women’s hair.
If you are the sort of person who thinks that studying the social implications of black women’s hair is a worthy pursuit, then you should probably buy this book. For the rest of us, it’s full of academic psychobabble and deliberately overcomplicated terms for simple, unoriginal ideas. She could easily make all her points in 10 pages, and even then, they wouldn’t be very interesting. The main argument is that for black women, hair is more than “just hair,” it’s a vehicle for expression that is often highly charged with political implications (I’m sorry, but it’s hard to even summarize this book without sounding like academic psychobabble). But wait – at other times, hair is “just hair”! She never really develops the point much further than that or provides any sort of explanation for why things are the way they are, but peppers the text with meaningless words like “problematize” and “intertextual” to stretch out the length and make herself sound smart. If you find this sort of self-important drivel as obnoxious as I do, then don’t buy the book. And if you’re buying this book because you’re enrolled in any of her classes, drop the class immediately.
Rating: 1 / 5