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ABSTRACT
Americanah (2013) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie brought to the forefront the natural hair movement as a form of resistance to Western aesthetics. However, this conversation overlooks the labor that goes into creating Africentric hairstyles. In this essay, I examine what hair signifies for immigrant hairstylists in order to articulate a cosmopolitan experience from the perspective of the racialized, gendered, and undocumented migrant worker. To understand how these migrants find belonging in the world, I argue against the abstraction of space, a predominant tendency in invocations of cosmopolitanism and its related strand, Afropolitanism. With that in mind, I look at the hair salon, a highly gendered and stratified space that reveals not only how the female workers are placed in a restrictive position, but also how they shape the space that they occupy through their service of braiding hair. I juxtapose this service and cultural act alongside Achille Mbembe's concept of interweaving worlds to show that the female migrant workers interweave divergent perspectives despite the disharmonious encounters produced by the invisible racial, ethnic, and class boundaries of the hair salon.
INTRODUCTION
Americanah (2013) by acclaimed Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie begins in Mariama's African Hair Braiding Salon where the story of Ifemelu, a successful and highly educated Nigerian immigrant living in Princeton, unfolds through a series of flashbacks, capturing the disorientation of immigrant life. Ifemelu travels from the wealthy neighborhood in Princeton to Trenton, New Jersey, the location of the salon, to braid her hair in preparation for her permanent return to Nigeria. Scholars have analyzed Ifemelu's choice to keep natural hair as a form of resistance to the Western ideals of beauty and selfexpression (Yerima). Upon arriving to the United States, Ifemelu relaxes her hair in order to fit in and to be considered professional, highlighting the racism deeply embedded in American society. However, little attention has been paid to what hair signifies for the hairstylists such as Aisha, an undocumented immigrant from Senegal working in Mariama's hair salon.
Exploring what it means to encounter dislocation and otherness only through Ifemelu's story and her relationship to hair prioritizes one type of immigrant experience and one way of seeing and belonging in the world. Discourses of globalization tend to focus on the mobile metropolitan...