“She’s connected to my head while doing my hair”: embodiment and Afrofeminist epistemologies in the documentaries of Rosine Mbakam

This article focuses on two films by Cameroonian documentary filmmaker Rosine Mbakam, Chez Jolie Coiffure (2018) and Les Prières de Delphine (2021). I examine her work in relation to the Eurocentric, positivist epistemological traditions associated with colonial documentary filmmaking about Africa. I suggest that her films advocate instead for an Afrocentric epistemological approach based on Black women’s ways of knowing and relating to the world. “Anchored in the flesh of everyday experiences,” Afrofeminist theorists emphasize the body as an alternative source of knowledge production and validation (Larcher 311). In Chez Jolie Coiffure and Les Prières de Delphine , we meet two Cameroonian women who migrate to Brussels and engage in sex work and hairdressing in order to survive, and consequently, embodied exchanges are central to our understanding of their experience as African female migrants in Europe. By focusing on various private acts of hairdressing and grooming, the films acquaint us with the ways in which subjugation and sexual violence have been marked and materially inscribed upon the Black female body. However, through the depiction of these same gestures of bodily administration and care, Mbakam’s films create a sense of community and solidarity with her protagonists and present them as agents of self-knowledge, capable of shaping their own representation onscreen. In this way, Mbakam’s films create a sense of diasporan solidarity, and offer more empathetic and dialogic methods of generating knowledge through documentary practice.