THE BEAUTY SHOP
Michael McMillan

‘Black folks spend more on hair and skin care products than they do on food.”
Launch Event / Wig Party: Bring your own or try our selection!
Thursday 24 January 2008, 6.30 – 9pm





Exhibition
25 January – 28 March 2008
Mon-Fri, 10 am – 5 pm

Following the critically acclaimed West Indian Front Room, which attracted 35,000 visitors to the Geffrye Museum in 2005-06, The Beauty Shop, Michael McMillan’s forthcoming exhibition at 198, explores practices and ideas related to the maintenance, transformation and representation of the black body in a post-colonial context.

The body is a contested space in contemporary consumer culture, where the desire and ability to transform hair, face, skin and body parts reveals complex dynamics around ideals of beauty.
For people of African descent, in a globalised world, hair texture, skin complexion, full nose, lips
and body shape, flesh out culturally and politically charged issues, that resonate in everyday life.

The cosmetics industry in general and the High Street beauty shop in particular, cater for the desire to transform hair and lighten skin. The Beauty Shop exhibition will bring the performative qualities of High Street cosmetic consumer culture to the gallery space, as a means to interact
with visitors.

The Beauty Shop will also explore the influences, which shape our understanding of “beauty” and the representation of the “self” by opening the lid on the personal and collective experience of hair, colour and the body. It will encourage visitors to engage with the multi-layered desires, practices, representations and ideologies mediated by the matrix of family, gender, sexuality, social status, education and cultural politics.



TALKS, EVENTS AND WORKSHOPS

‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’
Saturday 9 February 2008, 12 – 2 pm @ 198
An intergenerational retail therapy workshop using iconic brands to explore hair, skin and the body.
Please bring a product with personal meaning.
Free workshop, limited spaces available, booking required. Please contact 198.



‘The more it burns, the better it looks’
A writers’ saloon in the beauty salon
Thursday 21 February 2008, 7 - 9 pm @ 198
Performance poets Khadijah Ibrahiim & Malika Booker join Michael McMillan to reflect on “Bad Hair Days”,
“Geri-Curl Nightmares” and “Colour Affected Moments”
Free event, booking required. Please contact 198.




‘On Beauty’
Thursday 6 March 2008, 7 – 9 pm @ 198
A panel discussion interrogating ideas of beauty, body consumer culture and skin care science
in the African Diaspora.
With visual artist Barby Asante, Dr. Clara Kalu, Carol Tulloch and Michael McMillan.
Free event, booking required. Please contact 198


For more information about The Beauty Shop, please visit our new website: www.198.org.uk
We hope to see you soon!


198 Contemporary Arts and Learning 198 Railton Road, SE24 0JT.
T: +44(0) 207 978 8309
E: info@198org.uk,
W:www.198.org.uk

after all that talk on the blogs earlier this year...

...prompted by this Miami Herald and this Washington Post article, I got an announcement today about this book (too bad the cover wasn't larger) from Duke University Press:



360 pages (December 2007)
37 b&w photos, 9 tables

Cloth - $84.95
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-4018-8]
Paperback - $23.95
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-4037-9]

Black behind the Ears is an innovative historical and ethnographic examination of Dominican identity formation in the Dominican Republic and the United States. For much of the Dominican Republic’s history, the national body has been defined as “not black,” even as black ancestry has been grudgingly acknowledged. Rejecting simplistic explanations, Ginetta E. B. Candelario suggests that it is not a desire for whiteness that guides Dominican identity discourses and displays. Instead, it is an ideal norm of what it means to be both indigenous to the Republic (indios) and “Hispanic.” Both indigeneity and Hispanicity have operated as vehicles for asserting Dominican sovereignty in the context of the historically triangulated dynamics of Spanish colonialism, Haitian unification efforts, and U.S. imperialism. Candelario shows how the legacy of that history is manifest in contemporary Dominican identity discourses and displays, whether in the national historiography, the national museum’s exhibits, or ideas about women’s beauty. Dominican beauty culture is crucial to efforts to identify as “indios” because, as an easily altered bodily feature, hair texture trumps skin color, facial features, and ancestry in defining Dominicans as indios.

Candelario draws on her participant observation in a Dominican beauty shop in Washington Heights, a New York City neighborhood with the oldest and largest Dominican community outside the Republic, and on interviews with Dominicans in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Santo Domingo. She also analyzes museum archives and displays in the Museo del Hombre Dominicano and the Smithsonian Institution as well as nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European and American travel narratives.

“Based on first-rate ethnographic and historical research, Black behind the Ears provides fresh and original insights into the construction and representation of racial identities in the Dominican Republic and the United States. It is the most comprehensive, focused, and balanced treatment to date of Dominican racial and gender ideologies in the United States.”—Jorge Duany, author of The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States

“Black behind the Ears makes important contributions to our understanding of the Dominican experience. In this book, Ginetta E. B. Candelario shows processes of identity formation among Dominicans in different historical and geographical contexts, and she looks at the nuanced relationship between ethnic and racial identities. In my opinion, this is one of the best books written on the subject of racial, ethnic, and national identity formation in general.”—José Itzigsohn, author of Developing Poverty: The State, Labor Market Regulation, and the Informal Economy in Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic

“Ginetta E. B. Candelario’s Black behind the Ears argues compellingly that any serious effort to understand Dominican ideas and practices of race in the ancestral homeland as well as in the diaspora requires a large conceptual framework, a triangular geography of knowledge, and a cultural history formed by Dominican nation-building projects, the difficult plight of the Haitian Republic in the midst of a negrophobic world, the impact of U.S. racial thought, and the Latin American glorification of the Hispanic heritage. Candelario’s book remarkably dares to bring apparently disparate discursive sites to interact convincingly and engagingly in her analysis. The author renders facile readings of the Dominican chapter of the black experience in the Americas as exceptional or pathological simply unsustainable. She shows instead that it invites White Americans, African Americans, and other Latinos to revisit long-held assumptions about racial categories, ethnic identity, nationality, and the ideologies behind taking the ‘visible’ for ‘real’ in matters of race.”—Silvio Torres-Saillant, coauthor of The Dominican Americans

Ginetta E. B. Candelario is Associate Professor of Sociology and Latin American and Latina/o Studies at Smith College.

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