The Hands That Built Nations: Graphite Drawings of African Braiders
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63385/cvca.v2i1.473Keywords:
Hands, Built Nation, Graphite, Drawing, Labour, Decolonial, African BraiderAbstract
This paper examines how the worn-out hands of the African hair braider, drawn in heavy graphite, create a decolonial move. It re-positions these hands as instruments of labour into a text on which it argues that their labour is inherently connected to the larger, and mostly hidden, processes of postcolonial reconstruction and identification making. The article is presented from a material-based approach. This method is based on the notion that the physical characteristics of the artistic medium are not accidental but primary in the creation of meaning. In particular, it explores the functionality of the deliberate application of solid, tactile graphite, in its ability to produce deep shadows, extreme contrast, and a sculptural quality on paper as a critical signifier. The process enables the materialization of the weight, endurance, and heaviness of care work that can be expressed through the artwork to articulate what has been oppressed by traditional colonial archives. It is in this materialist perspective that the article shows how the image of hands of the braider has a critical intertextual dialogue with the national rebuilding narratives. It brings to view the invisible feminized labour which keeps communities and cultural memory alive and physically reinstates social identity following colonialism. This artistic intervention questions the erasures of the colonial archive and suggests a different mode of historical responsibility, which records the hair braider as a nation-builder and her hands as some of the major actors in the current project of cultural and social repossession.
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