Decolonial ethnography and intercultural writing from a female perspective in the graphic novel Hot Comb by Ebony Flowers
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.2420-8175/23838Keywords:
critical education, decolonial epistemologies, illustrated ethnography, women’s intercultural writing, graphic novelAbstract
This article explores the potential of decolonial knowledges for the development of gender- and intercultural-oriented educational research methodologies, taking Ebony Flowers’s graphic novel Hot Comb (2019) as a case study. The work, which intertwines life writing, collective memory, and an ethnographic gaze, is examined as a form of intercultural women’s writing capable of capturing the tensions between coloniality, identity, and the everyday practices of resistance of Afro-diasporic Black women. In dialogue with feminist and decolonial epistemologies (hooks, 2020; Lorde, 2022; Mignolo and Walsh, 2024), the analysis proposes a reading of Hot Comb through the lens of visual ethnography, where the visual, sensory, and narrative dimensions become a space for the production of embodied knowledges. Black hair emerges as an ethnographic object, an identity device, and a site of intergenerational and intercultural mediation. From a methodological perspective, the article adopts a qualitative-interpretive approach, treating the graphic novel as an epistemological educational space for intercultural and gender education, as well as for critical and reflexive pedagogical practices.
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