PhD Research Summary

Diasporic Experiences of Everyday Multiculturalism: Navigating Race and Space through African Women’s Beauty Practices

Research Context

Although I’ve spent over a decade in Canada pursing my tertiary education, as a black African woman my hair texture and skin colour often announce me as a perpetual foreigner in many of my intercultural encounters even before I speak. Even more so, whenever I change my hairstyle, wear an African-print outfit, headwrap, or “ethnic” beaded jewellery the comments and questions that come with these seemingly mundane choices have made it apparent time and again that my beauty practices aren’t just a frivolous indulgence but an important accessory for navigating a multicultural society where identity, belonging, race, and nationalism don’t just exist in a passport or flag but in my makeup bag as well.

As such, my PhD research was birthed from my personal experiences as a Zimbabwean international student studying in Canada. Over the years, while I often couldn’t articulate the feelings some of my intercultural experiences evoked at the time, I knew I wasn’t the only one wrestling with the oftentimes contradictory and confusing experiences I was having as a black immigrant woman. This need to find solidarity and belonging through exclamations of “me too!” from other black women going through their own immigrant journeys is what inspired me to interview other African women and hear their experiences so I could tell our stories as part of my doctoral work.

I would later come to understand that the source of my dissonance came from the fact that Canada proudly promotes multiculturalism. In fact, since 1971, multiculturalism policy in Canada has encouraged immigrants to retain their cultural heritage, values, and practices seeing them as complementary rather than antithetical to Canadian culture. Furthermore, despite the ongoing health, political, and economic crises globally (particularly between 2020-2022), the Canadian government continued to set the highest targets in history to welcome even more immigrants over the next three years to support Canada’s diverse society and its economic prosperity. So, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that multiculturalism is the heartbeat of Canadian society.

However, while Canadian political elites have taken pride in policies that promote Canadian immigration and diversity in a plethora of ways, I couldn’t help but question what the actual daily lived practice of cultural diversity, specifically from the perspective of immigrants and their communities, looks like. I mean, why were my personal lived experiences so different from official Canadian policies on multiculturalism and what political campaigns geared towards diversity promoted?

When I went in search of answers to these questions, I couldn’t find much (if anything at all) about how multiculturalism is experienced from the perspective of the immigrants themselves, specifically African women immigrants. That is when I discovered, much to my chagrin, that the migratory and multicultural experiences of this diverse African diaspora group, especially the women, are rarely discussed in official Canadian multiculturalism policy, the academic scholarship within the discipline of Political Science that I was studying at the time, pop culture or mainstream media.

Naturally then, I wanted to shed light on the ways in which African women engage in the daily mundane practice of cultural diversity. By centering African immigrant women in Canada, my PhD research aimed to shift broader discussions on race and multiculturalism from politicized top-down policy approaches to a more gendered Afrocentric perspective of how cultural diversity is interpreted and experienced on the ground in day-to-day lives.

So, while my PhD research was developing, I found my project organically gravitating towards the overlapping and intersecting themes of the African diaspora, African women’s agency, beauty practices, Canadian society, everyday multiculturalism, constructions of race (Blackness & Africanness), and various social spaces. That is to say, in one way or another for the duration of my time in Canada and throughout my doctoral research, I was repeatedly confronted with the question of what exactly constitutes “doing multiculturalism”, being Black, the public and the private in social spaces, nationalist/diaspora community, and notions of choice for an African immigrant woman living in Canada?

Research in a Nutshell

Cue my doctoral research which examined how everyday multiculturalism and the African diaspora mutually interact to shape racialization processes in multiple spaces, both public and private, through an exploration of African women’s beauty practices. Five main social spaces relevant to African women’s immigrant experiences of multiculturalism were analysed throughout my research including the self, the home, the church, social media, and the workplace. Everyday intercultural encounters happen in these spaces that include and exclude as well as connect and marginalise African immigrant women living in Canadian society which is why I wanted to explore them further.

Research Questions  

So, building on the Black and Postcolonial feminist literature on race-making through beauty, I asked two key research questions. Firstly, how do African women’s diasporic experiences of everyday multiculturalism in a globalized world shape social spaces and impact gendered racialization processes as evinced through beauty practices? Secondly, how do African diaspora women exercise agency as they navigate these spaces?

Research Design (methodology)

My project’s overall methodology was guided by a feminist qualitative research framework to bring to light African women’s marginalized and excluded experiences that are often hidden and unarticulated in official Canadian multiculturalism policies and academic scholarship. This research design included a mixed methods approach of one-on-one in-depth interviews with African immigrant women (from Benin, Burundi, Congo, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe) based in Ottawa and Toronto Canada, participant observation in the project’s 5 key spaces (the individual self, the home, the church, social media, and the workplace) and content analysisof social media photos, videos, and black beauty blogs and websites.

My definition of “everyday beauty practices” included hair, skin, body, fashion, and cosmetics; and the ways in which African women engage in any of these practices in their day-to-day as they navigate a multicultural society. Most importantly, I focused on Black African women (as opposed to other Black & minority immigrant women), specifically because as a group, African women remain underrepresented in the mainstream media, academic literature, pop culture and other discussions on beauty, race, and multiculturalism.

Thesis Key Arguments

Blending analytic themes of everyday multiculturalism with the African diaspora while incorporating concepts from critical race theory, the public-private dichotomy, the women-as-nation premise, and feminist insights on agency, my thesis made 3 central arguments based on the data findings.

Firstly, I argued the dynamic interplay between everyday multiculturalism and the African diaspora simultaneously reconstitutes social spaces by creating rich combinations of complex experiences that challenge and redefine the “public” and “private” in various spaces through new meanings of race, beauty, class, pan-African continentalism, long-distance nationalism, multiculturalism, sexuality, and gender.

Secondly, I argued everyday multiculturalism and the African diaspora simultaneously structure racialization processes so that African women’s racialized identities are layered, formed, and informed by a new African diaspora community within Canada, local nationalist and postcolonial racial formations, Canadian discourses of multiculturalism, and globalized meanings of Blackness. Furthermore, racialization processes are constantly shifting across social spaces so that women creatively juggle different racialized identities by creating hybrid iterations, of being African and Black, that are heterogenous, complex, and multilayered.

Lastly, I argued everyday multiculturalism and the African diaspora interact in paradoxical fashion to produce a conception of agency reflective of simultaneous articulations including accommodation and resistance. The ways women use their beauty practices to navigate race and space then reveal the context dependent manifestations of different expressions of agency in the public and private. This complex dynamic makes it difficult to neatly generalize African women as either completely agentive or completely oppressed in any given space.

Value of Research

 Through my doctoral research, I sought to bring attention to African women’s immigrant experiences of multiculturalism to increase cultural awareness and racial engagement on the issues this group of immigrant women face at multiple levels while living in Canadian society. As such, focusing on African women’s beauty practices was a way to shift from a normative Western-centric political understanding of multiculturalism to show how it is in fact a lived gendered and racialized phenomenon that takes place in everyday life within various social spaces.

That being so, it’s my hope that my PhD work begins to bring African women from the margins in discussions about multiculturalism and race by making us visible and emphasizing our cultural and racialized identities as displayed through everyday beauty practices. Questions of race, identity, belonging, and community will continue to be challenging, inspiring, messy, and complicated but as African women, we’re confidently and boldly navigating this one hairstyle, one lipstick shade, and one outfit at a time!

 ***

Adapted from my PhD dissertation which can be found here. Citation:

Chimhanda, R. (2021). Diasporic Experiences of Everyday Multiculturalism: Navigating Race and Space through African Women’s Beauty Practices. Carleton University, Ottawa Canada.