From The Kitchen To The Parlor: Language And Becoming In African American Women's Hair Care Paperback

Lanita Jacobs-Huey

When 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.

0195304160

9780195304169

English

Oxford University Press Inc

20 April 2006

200

Lanita Jacobs-Huey is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and co-affiliated with the Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

This work is not only deeply original but it is also brave: Jacobs-Huey has tackled a range of issues that are highly charged, both in the arena of racial politics and, even trickier for her, in negotiating her own place in multiple communities of practice. That she so successfully balances the scholarly, the political, and the personal is testament to her rare combination of considerable analytic talent with keen political and emotional intelligence.--Sally McConnell-Ginet, Department of Linguistics, Cornell University, co-author of Language and Gender