Public Intimacies and Wig Spaces: Entangled Migrations of Korean and African Americans

Min Kyung Lee discusses the Korean-owned wig store as an overlooked urban space through which Korean and African American migrations became materially entangled in the late twentieth-century United States. These wig stores constituted a distinct typology of gendered public space produced through intersecting mobilities. Drawing on spatial history, migration studies, oral history, and material culture, she examines how the organization of these “wig spaces” facilitated intimate encounters across racial, linguistic, cultural, and class differences. They linked Black American neighborhoods to the broader world, while at the same time, becoming increasingly marginalized through US urban divestment practices and policies. Personal interactions and global connections through new commodity markets of wigs were shaped by the Cold War geopolitics and economic policies that connected South Korean manufacturing, Korean migration, emergent beauty cultures, African American migration, and Philadelphia’s changing commercial landscape. Ultimately, the wig store itself functioned as a space of “public intimacy,” connecting bodies and places despite US segregation practices in the post-war period.

Organised by Professor Robin Schuldenfrei, Tangen Professor in 20th Century Modernism in collaboration with Professor Klara Kemp-Welch, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History.