ABSTRACT
Historically, kinky or straight hair is, of course, not only a white man's but also a black man's issue. In contemporary African-American culture, hair is a subject of considerable importance. Levi-Strauss suggests that what makes racism so difficult to ameliorate is the association of white skin and straight hair with the apparent progress of white civilization. Baldness is a symptom, a compromise formation, by which she attempts, once and for all, to nullify the oppositions kinkystraight, black-white. In The Colored Museum, the playwright George C. Wolfe, artistic director and producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival, employs the image of baldness to satirize the kinky–straight opposition. Hair is one of the most easily alterable physical appurtenances. It is easier to change one's hair style than to change, say, one's skin color, one's nose, one's lips, or other parts of one's body, although through technology, including cosmetics, contraptions and devices, or surgery, all of those things are possible, too.
