Decolonising My Body

A radical exploration of rituals and beauty

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Decolonising My Body

By: Afua Hirsch

Narrated by: Afua Hirsch

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Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

How do we determine what is beautiful? Whose standards are we trying to meet when we spend our hard-earned money on our haircare, skincare and makeup; where do they come from, and how can we learn to undo them?

Upon getting her first tattoo at 40 years old, award-winning journalist Afua Hirsch embarked on a journey to reclaim her body from the colonial ideas of purity, adornment and ageing she - and many of us - absorbed while growing up. Informed by research from around the world, Afua will look at how individual and collective notions of what is beautiful are constructed or stripped away from us. Through personal anecdotes, interviews from beauty experts, practitioners and service users, she explores the global history of skin, hair and body modification rituals. These insights and discoveries will empower readers to reconnect with their cultures of origin, better understand the link between beauty and politics, and liberate themselves from mainstream beauty standards that aren't serving them.

©2023 Afua Hirsch (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Afua HirschAfua HirschVintage Digital

Anthropology

Beauty, Grooming & Style

Customs & Traditions

Social Sciences

Thought-Provoking

Anthropology Beauty, Grooming & Style Customs & Traditions Social Sciences Thought-Provoking

Critic reviews

Exceptionally rich, inspiring, challenging, wise and moving. I didn't realise I needed this book until I read it and felt stirrings towards my own ancestral awakening of African female cultural beliefs and practices that were sadly long ago lost to the colonial project. This is a ground-breaking book that speaks to all women.

We’re talking a lot about identity and race and politics, but also about the impact of colonialism on body image, and it’s just something that I had never considered before. I felt like I was learning a lot in reading her book … Celebrates women how they are, as they are.

I would wholeheartedly recommend Decolonising My Body by Afua Hirsch. It is a very brave and honest exploration, almost and excavation of Eurocentric standards of beauty and perceptions of body, particularly of the female body. It is also a calm and wise call of an awakening, a friendly – or sisterly – invitation to a transformative journey beyond these mental walls that have been erected around and between us by capitalism and patriarchy and colonialism. I found it both universal and timely (Elif Shafak)

There's something on every page of this book that you didn't know before, or makes you look at things a new. An important publication.

Disarmingly honest... quietly radical

A remarkable journey to unlearn western beauty standards and explore ancestral skin, hair and body modification rituals. (Funmi Fetto)

Decolonising my Body is both a generous offering, and a joy filled testimony. Afua skilfully pulls us into her world, and generously allows us to accompany her on a journey of questioning and unpacking notions of beauty. This exploration lights a path for all people who seek to (re)connect with more expansive understandings of beauty.

Afua has cut through so much of the noise to provide an enlightening and necessary reflection on how we can learn from the wisdom and beauty of our ancestors to become spiritually healthier humans. This book is a knowledge gift to us all.

The journalist, commentator and author of Brit(ish) reflects on twelve months radical unlearning of Eurocentric and patriarchal conventions of beauty in this powerful and challenging volume.

Afua Hirsch’s Decolonising My Body is a breath of fresh air and is a travel book, a beauty book, and a history book all in one. It made me think about capitalism and race and the body in a new way

Most relevant

Before I read this book I made a whole lot of assumptions about the themes that would be discussed and I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Instead what I received is the gift of why I love reading. The chance to learn and to think and to consider new thoughts.

I often think of my blackness which can be gleaned from the choices of books I’ve read over the years and I’ve never felt a connection with any conventional religion and it’s only been since approaching my 50th birthday in 2024 that I started developing awareness of the possible spiritual practices of my ancestors.

This is the book I didn’t know I needed. Without the influence of this book for my birthday I had 3 tattoos done, then a further two all of significance to me and not yet linked with my ancestors and feel validated that doing what my parents would disapprove of was actually absolutely an ode to my authentic self as is the septum piercing I got.

I know want to experience similar things to what Afua has in her delving into of her ancestral self devoid of colonialistic influence.

If you are a black woman in the diaspora then, dare I say, this is a MUST read.

Thank you Afua.