ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows Black beauty as performative and as such is an ongoing negotiation of aesthetics, stylization and politics produced through the mobility and mobilization of beauty knowledge, stylization technologies, feminist and anti-racist/Black Nationalist ideology in the Black Atlantic diaspora. It shifts from the colonial to the contemporary, from the Caribbean, to Britain, to the US, to Latin America tries to capture Black beauty's mobility and genealogies. The book deals with the issue of anti-racist aesthetics in the 21st century, the question of the racialized hierarchy embedded in hair and how women negotiate specifically Black political contestations along the natural/unnatural hair binary. It looks at the Jamaican diasporic category the browning, enracing and being raced and the challenges these offer to the ideas on beauty emanating from both Black anti-racist aesthetics and hegemonic whiteness.
