Emma Dabiri: Hair, History and the Possibility of Solidarity

Emma Dabiri's writing begins with experiences that are often dismissed as personal or superficial, then follows them into history. Hair, beauty and the pressure to fit in become ways of examining race, power and belonging. An Irish-Nigerian writer with a substantial career in Britain, she also asks how people can act together across the divisions they inherit.

Don't Touch My Hair is a title that establishes a boundary. It speaks to the assumption that a Black person's body is available for someone else's curiosity. Yet the book opens out from that immediate encounter into a much wider account of knowledge, creativity and cultural memory.

Published in 2019, Dabiri's first book treats Black hair as a subject deserving sustained intellectual attention. Its range includes African histories, popular culture, commerce and the politics of appearance. The ordinary act of styling hair becomes a way to question what counts as knowledge and who gets to decide. [1]

A childhood between worlds

Dabiri grew up in Dublin, with an Irish mother and a Nigerian father, after spending part of her early childhood in the United States. In interviews she has described the isolation and racism she encountered in Ireland. Reading became a source of explanation and companionship, helping her seek out histories that were largely absent from the world around her. [2][3]

That background needs to be understood in its own terms. An Irish-Nigerian experience is not simply a British experience under another name. Ireland's history, national self-image and relationship with Britain create different points of reference, even where the racism a Black child encounters may feel painfully familiar.

For readers in Britain, the distinction makes her work more useful. It encourages comparison without assuming that every country produces racial categories in the same way. A person can share a language, cultural interests and experiences of exclusion with others while understanding the surrounding history differently.

Finding a language for experience

After school, Dabiri moved to Britain to study history and African Studies at SOAS. She later spent more than a decade teaching in its African department. Her professional biographies also record research in visual sociology at Goldsmiths, alongside work in broadcasting and cultural criticism. [3][4]

The movement from childhood reading to formal study helps explain a feature of her writing: personal experience prompts a question, but it does not supply the whole answer. Research offers a way to place an encounter within a longer history, to recognise patterns and to challenge an explanation that once seemed unavoidable.

This matters particularly when shame has been made to feel natural. A person taught that their hair is difficult may first try to solve the supposed problem privately. Historical enquiry changes the starting point. It asks how the judgement was formed, whose appearance supplied the standard and why other possibilities were excluded.

Hair as a record of creativity

Don't Touch My Hair moves across periods and places, considering Black hairstyling through politics, business, artistic expression and forms of knowledge. Dabiri's discussion includes the intelligence embodied in intricate patterns and the importance of practices passed between people. The book's American edition appeared under the title Twisted: The Tangled History of Black Hair Culture. [1][5]

A hairstyle is both visible and practical. Someone has learned how to make it, how long it will take and what care it needs. Its creation can involve family relationships, professional skill and hours of patient work. Treating it only as an image misses the knowledge that makes the image possible.

That observation has wider implications for cultural history. Skills transmitted through hands and conversation are easily overlooked when institutions give priority to written records. The absence of a practice from a conventional archive does not establish that it lacked sophistication. It may instead expose the archive's limitations.

The politics of an ordinary appearance

The force of Dabiri's subject lies partly in the gap between how routine hair care is and how heavily Black hair can be interpreted. A style may be read as a declaration even when its wearer is simply getting ready for work. Someone else's supposedly neutral appearance is allowed to pass without explanation.

The distinction between preference and judgement is therefore important. People can enjoy different styles, change their appearance and make choices for many reasons. A historical account should widen that freedom. It should also identify the circumstances in which a person is pressured to alter themselves to appear acceptable.

There is a further question about whose creativity receives recognition. A fashion can move into a new setting while losing the names and histories associated with it. Asking how that happens is more demanding than treating cultural exchange as automatically innocent or automatically impossible. It requires attention to credit, power and the conditions in which exchange takes place.

Bringing the conversation to television

Dabiri presented Hair Power: Me and My Afro, a Channel 4 documentary in which Black men and women discussed their experiences through their hair. Directed by Nicole Charles and made by Pulse Films, the programme placed a range of voices alongside the subject Dabiri had explored in print. [6]

Television adds something a book cannot reproduce in quite the same way. A viewer sees the hair being discussed and hears the person describe it. Expression and tone can complicate an account that might otherwise be summarised too quickly as either pain or pride.

The shared subject does not make the participants interchangeable. That is one reason a conversation involving several people can be valuable: it creates room for differences of generation, gender and personal preference. An audience can recognise a pattern while still encountering individuals who have their own relationships with it.

Her other broadcasting work has included Britain's Lost Masterpieces, Back in Time for Brixton and radio programmes about Afrofuturism. These projects reveal interests extending beyond the subject that first made her widely known as an author. Art, domestic history and imagined futures all belong within her cultural range. [4][7]

Moving from recognition to collective action

What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition followed in 2021. The short book examines racism alongside class and capitalism, challenging forms of response that place personal innocence or the performance of concern at the centre. Its emphasis is on the possibilities of collective action. [8]

The difference matters because recognition alone does not establish a political relationship. Someone may know which statements to make while remaining uncertain about what they are prepared to change. Coalition asks a further set of questions: what are people trying to achieve, what can they do together, and how will they address disagreement?

It also alters the position assigned to those involved. If one group is imagined mainly as the generous helper and another as the permanent recipient of help, an unequal relationship can survive inside the language of support. Working towards a shared objective makes responsibility more demanding and more reciprocal.

Dabiri has connected this interest with both Black and Irish radical traditions. In her own account, the anti-imperialist strand of Irish culture helped shape her thinking, even while racism complicated her sense of belonging there. That combination refuses the assumption that the injustices within a society erase everything its political traditions might offer. [3]

An argument that requires attention to difference

Coalition does not mean pretending that everyone starts from the same position. People enter a campaign with different resources, exposure to risk and experiences of institutions. A shared aim has to be worked out through those differences, rather than declared above them.

This is where Dabiri's argument offers a useful challenge for community organisations and cultural institutions. A public statement is easy to recognise and circulate. A durable relationship is slower: it involves listening, practical commitments, accountability and the possibility of changing a plan when another person reveals what it overlooks.

The book's title addresses white readers, but the question is not confined to them. Any movement has to consider how its members relate to one another and what kind of change its methods can produce. The history of collective action becomes a resource for thinking, rather than a supply of reassuring slogans.

Disobedient Bodies and the terms of beauty

In 2023, Dabiri published Disobedient Bodies: Reclaim Your Unruly Beauty, an essay accompanying Wellcome Collection's exhibition The Cult of Beauty. It examines the pressure to correct supposed physical defects and asks how dominant ideals become bound up with commerce and social power. [9]

The subject develops concerns already present in her first book while widening their scope. Appearance is not merely something viewed from outside. People learn to monitor themselves, sometimes with extraordinary severity, according to standards they did not choose. An industry can then offer remedies for the dissatisfaction those standards help produce.

There is room here to distinguish pleasure from obligation. Enjoying clothes, hair or make-up does not necessarily mean accepting every judgement attached to them. Equally, being told to feel confident does not remove the pressures operating around a person. A more useful freedom would include the ability to enjoy adornment without having one's worth depend on it.

The invitation to disobedience can therefore be read as an invitation to notice. Which rules are being followed? What do they cost in money, time or attention? Who benefits from treating them as inevitable? These questions return bodily experience to the social world that helps shape it.

A writer across several traditions

Dabiri was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023. Her work crosses scholarship, documentary and the public essay, forms that demand different kinds of precision. She can begin with a recognisable encounter while asking readers to follow an argument beyond the immediate circumstances. [7]

For Black British readers, her importance includes the perspective she brings from outside a narrowly national account. Ireland, Nigeria, Britain and the wider African diaspora do not merge into one experience. They offer points of connection, friction and comparison through which familiar assumptions become less secure.

Her three books also make a clear reading journey. Don't Touch My Hair begins with a specific cultural practice; What White People Can Do Next asks about political relationships; Disobedient Bodies returns to the intimate pressures of appearance. Together they connect self-understanding with the harder question of how people might live differently alongside one another.

Sources

[1] Penguin — Don't Touch My Hair

[2] The Irish Times — interview on childhood and Don't Touch My Hair

[3] Violet Simon — interview with Emma Dabiri

[4] Profile Books — Emma Dabiri biography

[5] University of Michigan Law Library — Twisted bibliographic record

[6] Nicole Charles — Hair Power: Me and My Afro

[7] Royal Society of Literature — Emma Dabiri

[8] Penguin — What White People Can Do Next

[9] Wellcome Collection — Disobedient Bodies