Barbershops in the Black community are discursive spaces in which the confluence of Black hair care, for and by Black people, and small talk establish a context for cultural exchange. This interpretive ethnography describes the barbershop in a Black community as a cultural site for ethnographic exploration and description. The article defines a cultural site not only as the chosen geo-social locale of the ethnographic gaze but also as a centralized occasion within a cultural community that serves at the confluence of banal ritualized activity and the exchange of cultural currency. It is the social experience of being in the barbershop that the article focuses on, knowing that social experience meets at the intersection of culture and performance, and at the confluence of reflection and remembrance.
This article uses the iconic text Black Skin/White Masks by Frantz Fanon as a metonymic trope to examine the nature of White Studies through the autobiographical frame of a Black critic. The article is structured around three components. First, the socially constructed identity of “Whiteness” as embedded in, emergent from, and critiqued by those in (and of) the project of White Studies. Second, it addresses the question of how White Studies serves as a project for “sustaining Whiteness,” in light of increasing social and cultural critique of Whiteness. Third, the article initiates an argument for the performative nature of Whiteness that crosses borders of race and ethnicity. The article also address issues of authenticity embedded in the politics and intersections of performing race and culture while extending the notion of Whiteness, like Blackness, as a performative accomplishment.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.