Exploring new sources and digital research methods, the argument is developed through six thematic chapters. This study, then, is partly a history of South African state-making, and partly a social history of how transnational migrants negotiate long-distance mobility within certain structural constraints and opportunities. This, in turn, galvanised reforms in the border regime, but border-control systems were never foolproof. As a result, subaltern migrants developed their own vernacular responses to colonial power. Anti-alienist hopes for an impermeable, coercive border regime were often undermined by strategic permissiveness and chaotic incapacity at the local level. This dissertation argues that early twentieth-century South Africa, straddling both Indian and Atlantic Ocean migrant networks, developed a restrictive but ultimately ambiguous international border-control system that resourceful migrants learned to manipulate. Exploring the verbal and visual discourses of Chinese hair imports and pertinent hairstyles in early popular American periodicals, this article uses feminist theories, critical race feminisms, fashion and beauty theories, and Asian American studies to broaden critical insights into gendered and racialized traditions of exclusion. During the era, media sensationalism surrounding the pompadour’s incorporation of Chinese tresses, especially male “pigtails,” spawned questions and anxieties around domesticity and consumption, national belonging and exclusion. At the same time, however, the Gibson Girl phenomenon pivoted on participation in mass consumerism, and a reliable supplement of hair via imports from China. Chinese hair imports were essential to building the age’s signature pompadour hairstyle popularized by the iconic Gibson Girl, an early version of the New Woman linked to fantasies of the white American nation-state and national boundaries. As Sinophobia swept across the country, hundreds of editorials and illustrated news items on “artificial” hair from China circulated nationwide in such publications as the New York Times, San Francisco Call, and Cosmopolitan. This article examines Chinese hair imports in the text and imagery of popular American newspapers and magazines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, overlapping the first federal restrictions on Chinese immigration.
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