Empowered, almost: luxury consumption and the crooked urban life

Abstract

ABSTRACT “What’s hair got do with it?” is the question at the heart of this paper that is based on fieldwork in Lagos and Ibadan, Nigeria (June 2022–September 2022; April–June 2023). These two cities are undergoing urban change, particularly in terms of renewal, beautification, and more regional and foreign investments. I engage with ethnographic fiction and ethnographic reflection to explore youth's desire to consume luxury as a pathway to empowerment via upward social mobility so that they can partake in the “good” parts of urban change while trying to circumvent increasing uncertainty and high levels of unemployment in the city. Through this engagement, I consider how beauty is deeply spatial by highlighting the relationship between hair, aspirational identity, imagined future selves and youth (im)mobility in two short stories, Miracle and Lagos Big Babe. Informed by Faria and Fluri’s (2022, Allure and the spatialities of nationalism, war and development: Towards a geography of beauty. Geography Compass, 16(9), e12652. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12652) work on the geography of beauty, I emphasize that beauty has a material and affective quality that is corporeal and grounded in place. I tie the two stories together in my reflection on the role hair can play in building social capital and increasing social mobility while arguing that these aspirational identities are being fashioned in structurally skewed discursive neoliberal urban spaces.