| Emma Dabiri | |
| Honorific Suffix: | FRSL |
| Birth Place: | Dublin, Ireland |
| Discipline: | Black studies |
| Sub Discipline: | African Diaspora Studies |
Emma Dabiri FRSL (born 25 March 1979) is an Irish author, academic, and broadcaster. Her debut book, Don't Touch My Hair, was published in 2019. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.[1]
Dabiri was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and a Nigerian Yoruba father. After spending her early years in Atlanta, Georgia, her family returned to Dublin when Dabiri was five years of age.[2] She says that her experience of growing up isolated and as the target of frequent racism informed her perspective (2019).[3] After leaving school, she moved to London to study African Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), her academic career leading to broadcast work, including co-presenting BBC Four's Britain's Lost Masterpieces, Channel 4 documentaries such as Is Love Racist?, and a radio show about Afrofuturism, among others.[4]
Dabiri is a frequent contributor to print and online media, including The Guardian, Irish Times, Dublin Inquirer, Vice, and others.[5] She has also published in academic journals. Dabiri's outspokenness on issues of race and racism has caused her to have to deal with extreme trolling and racist abuse online. She says of this that "it's just words" and the racism she grew up with fortified her to deal with it.[6] She is the author of three books: Don't Touch My Hair (2019), What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition (2021), and Disobedient Bodies: Reclaim Your Unruly Beauty (2023).
Dabiri holds a Western Marxist's critique of capitalism, and in What White People Can Do Next, she dedicates a chapter to "Interrogate Capitalism", building upon the ideas of Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, and Frantz Fanon.[7] Western Marxism places greater emphasis on the study of the cultural trends of capitalist society. Dabiri summarizes: "In fact, in many ways race and capitalism are siblings", and while "capitalism exists, racism will continue".
Dabiri lives in London, where she is completing her PhD in visual sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, while also teaching at SOAS and continuing her broadcast work.[8] [9] She is married and has two children.
Dabiri has appeared on the television programmes Have I Got News For You, Portrait Artist of the Year.[10] and Question Time.[11]
In her 2019 book Don't Touch My Hair, Dabiri combines memoir with social commentary and philosophy. She moves beyond the personal to examine African hair in wider contexts, with the book travelling across geographical space and through time to take in pre-colonial Africa up to modern day Western society. Throughout she writes that African hair represents a complex visual language.[12]
Throughout the book, she explores the erasure, stigmatization and appropriation of Black hair. Dabiri uses a historical and cultural approach to investigate the global history of racism towards Black hair, while taking readers on her own personal journey of self-love and acceptance.[13]
Additionally, Dabiri analyses such topics as the criminalization of dreadlocks and the natural hair movement.[14]
The review by Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff in The Guardian summed up Don't Touch My Hair by saying: "The first title of its kind, with fresh ideas and a vivid sense of purpose, Dabiri's book is groundbreaking."[15]
The Book was released in the US in 2020 under the title Twisted: The Tangled History of Black Hair Culture.[16]
TIME magazine described Dabiri's 2021 book What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition as
In Disobedient Bodies, Dabiri explores the world of modern beauty and how it has been historically used as a tool of oppression by the patriarchal society. Drawing on philosophies like the Cartesian idea of the separation of mind and body, attributing mind to male and body to female characteristics, she makes the point that the currect political and social system is designed to keep people feeling insecure at all times.[17] In a radical and deeply personal way, she suggests ways to embrace the unruliness and disobedience of the body, and how beauty exists not as a superficial feature, but rather as a physical and spiritual harmony. [18]
In a review of Disobedient Bodies, The Irish Times author Anna Carey writes: "This call to joyful disobedience is further proof that Dabiri is one of our most important and exciting thinkers and writers."[19]
Dabiri released the book as an accompaniment to the exhibition titled "The Cult of Beauty" at the Wellcome Collection in autumn 2023. [20]