“A country of hair”: A global story of Korean wigs, Korean-American entrepreneurs, African-American hairstyles, and Cold War industrialization

Abstract

How did South Korea become a “country of hair” in the 1960s and 1970s – a country where wigs were the #2 export, powering industrialization? Where this unusual renewable resource was in such high demand that a young girl was murdered for her hair? This lunchtime talk will answer these questions by tracing the “life” of a marginal commodity, the human-hair wig, through its many transnational transformations: from the heads of rural South Koreans to the hands of female factoryworkers in Seoul to the shoulder bags of Korean-American peddlers to the heads of African-American women. By combing through this tangled history, we will see how empire, race, and gender shaped Asian industrialization and globalization during the Cold War; and discuss how to use interdisciplinary methods to write a global history.