The haunted happiness of racialised beauty: a performative theoretical view

This chapter concerns the racialised meanings and politics of black women’s embrace of hair weaves and wigs as technologies of feminine beautification, and feelings of happiness therein. Based on interviews with 18 young Nigerian women who dress and feel this way, the chapter seeks to decentre easy and ready readings of them as subjects who are wanting or trying to be ‘white.’ Instead it makes a case for understanding and allowing that weaves and wigs have become technologies of blackness, albeit haunted as such by the violence of the very notion of race as well as ongoing histories of anti-black racism. The argument is premised on a theoretical understanding of blackness as a performatively constituted category of being, that is to say, a material and cultural construct that is made in the repeated doing, inscribing and embodying of it, such that it cannot be fixed but rather can be, and is, fashioned in multiple and changing ways.