Hairtales: A Multimodal Analysis of Self & Self-Expression of Black Girls’ Hair in Children’s Literature

• In Event: “Be Real Black For Me”: Black Livingness in Children’s Literature - From Past to Present to Hopeful Futures

Abstract

Hair has long been a visual assertion of identity for people of African descent, especially girls and women. In the Black community hairstyles are used as a means of self-expression, spiritual significance, resistance and joy. The legacy of discrimination by hair texture has been maintained for centuries as natural hairstyles and protective styling may still be viewed as less desired and professional (Lewis, 1999; Patton, 2006). Black girls have been denied in many ways the autonomy and ownership of governing their own bodies. This article focuses specifically on hair, as an extension of the Black body. Schools and districts across the globe maintain policies that ban hairstyles associated with African heritage including locs, head wraps, and afros. Black girls at a very early age become cognizant of dominant society’s view of Black girls’ hair and internalize these visual messages which become part of a Black girl’s perception of self. This article utilizes Black girlhood as a framework in a critical multimodal qualitative inquiry to explore the complexities of representations of Black girls’ hair in picturebooks.
Using a data corpus of 55 picturebooks the authors analyzed the multimodal messages embedded in the initial introductions of Black girl protagonists. The findings suggest that contemporary children’s literature represents a broad array of Black girls’ hair, even when the central message is not about hair, denoting the importance of this cultural representation in assertions of identity. Our analysis helped us identify elevation of hair as the major recurring theme that cut across all picturebook images in the corpus, regardless of date of publication.
Black hair has the unique characteristic of growing upward and outward. This is evident in the afros and afro puffs present in many of the pictures. In I Got the Rhythm (Schofield & Morrison, 2014), One Word from Sophia (Averbeck, 2015), and I am Enough (Byers, 2018), we see the slicked back full and voluminous afro puffs that the protagonists wear proudly. For example, in the illustrations of My Mommy Medicine (Danticat, 2019) and Just Like a Mama (Duncan, 2019) the hair of the protagonist is literally huge and high. The daughter’s hair is twice the size of her face in the illustration on the opening spread. In Grandma’s Purse (Brantley-Newton, 2018) the pigtails of our protagonists seem to be in flight. Although the data corpus was intentionally created with books that weren’t explicitly about hair, the illustrations in each book visually represent the importance of hair. In multiple areas of society and culture, the interwoven nature of Black girlhood and hair cannot be denied. The importance of hair was portrayed in each book as intentional and as powerful. The girls’ hair, as an extension of their body, became text. In regarding the body as text, this power and language, “affords a different type of meaning-making for young Black girls, which is an embodied communicative site (Muhammed and Haddix, 2016, p.316).

Author

• Reka C. Barton, University of Maryland