"This book examines how the politics of dress has been incorporated in constructions of nationhood in both Asia and the Americas, and reveals how politicians and political regimes (including tribal, revolutionary, authoritarian, colonial, and democratic) manipulate sumptuary practices in order to create national identities, to legitimise hierarchies of power or to build personal political identities. Exploring the interlinked narratives of Schwerd’s “mourning portraits” and Victorian hairwork, this article uses cultural theory, material culture studies, archival research, fashion theory, and African American studies to broaden critical insights into state-sanctioned racial and class-based violence, and modes of resistance that take shape through aesthetic and representational forms. On the other hand, they expand and politicize the meanings of commemorative hair forms and fragments toward evoking collective histories, memories, and larger social issues, bringing new urgency and immediacy to fashion-related material cultures of mourning. Thus, on one hand, they take inspiration from Victorian hairwork traditions, which channeled the talismanic power of hair fragments to evoke absent bodies and memory. They also incorporate African American hairstyling techniques to interpret the flood-ravaged homes of local residents. Their title, Mourning Portrait, recalls nineteenth-century traditions of mourning and commemorative hairwork in which the locks of living and dead loved ones were manipulated into intricate fashions and home décor. Fashioned from hairpieces discovered in the 2005 wreckage of Hurricane Katrina, they are memorials to the African American victims and evacuees of the storm. This article examines sculptural portraits by artist Loren Schwerd. Exploring the verbal and visual discourses of Chinese hair imports and pertinent hairstyles in early popular American periodicals, this article uses feminist theories, critical race feminisms, fashion and beauty theories, and Asian American studies to broaden critical insights into gendered and racialized traditions of exclusion. During the era, media sensationalism surrounding the pompadour’s incorporation of Chinese tresses, especially male “pigtails,” spawned questions and anxieties around domesticity and consumption, national belonging and exclusion. At the same time, however, the Gibson Girl phenomenon pivoted on participation in mass consumerism, and a reliable supplement of hair via imports from China. Chinese hair imports were essential to building the age’s signature pompadour hairstyle popularized by the iconic Gibson Girl, an early version of the New Woman linked to fantasies of the white American nation-state and national boundaries. As Sinophobia swept across the country, hundreds of editorials and illustrated news items on “artificial” hair from China circulated nationwide in such publications as the New York Times, San Francisco Call, and Cosmopolitan. This article examines Chinese hair imports in the text and imagery of popular American newspapers and magazines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, overlapping the first federal restrictions on Chinese immigration.
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