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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how ‘new’ contact zones such as African hair salons in urban India and the accompanying consumption and trade in Indian hair by African migrant women located in Delhi ascribes anew racialised values of beauty, ‘blackness’, and ‘Indianness’ through bodily and material encounters.

Paper long abstract:

Practices and expressions of bodily transformations - intimately linked to questions of values and valuing, beauty and desire, the senses and sensuality - are embedded in varied local cosmologies as well as global capitalist flows. To this extent, this paper explores how African hair salons in urban India and the business in human hair constitute 'new' contact zones that connect postcolonial subjects in corporeal and material ways; hair, as organic molecular matter produced by the human body, not only informs meaning-making as a sociocultural bodily signifier, but once disembodied, is also a highly globalized and specialized commodity used for weaves, extensions, wigs and toupees. Several African migrants arrive in India today for the purpose of doing business in Indian hair, with migrant women from countries such as Nigeria, Cameroon and Uganda establishing and running hair salons across Delhi that cater to an African clientele. ‘Indian’ hair, procured through a range of sites such as temples and hair salons in India, is especially desired as a luxury commodity for use in hair weaves and extensions by African women. This paper is based upon ethnographic research conducted with West African migrants in Delhi since 2015. It explores how ‘new’ contact zones such as African hair salons in urban India and the accompanying consumption and trade in Indian hair by African migrant women located in Delhi ascribes anew racialised values of beauty, ‘blackness’ and ‘Indianness’ through bodily and material encounters.