Legal case analysis uncovers connections between hair regulations and racial politics in Jamaica, highlighting the persistence of colonial governance in postcolonial institutions.
This paper discusses the links between hair and Jamaica's often unnamed ‘race’ politics as an expression of waywardness. Using a court ruling in which a 7‐year‐old, female student was mandated to cut her hair—at the time worn in locs hairstyle—it teases out the links between embodiment, coloniality and incidents of racism which show up in the state's (post)‐colonial imagination of itself as ‘new’ and sovereign.
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Agostinho M.N. Pinnock (2026) studied this question.
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