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Decolonising My Body
On Ancestry, Tradition and Cultural Reinvention
Brief Description
The Sunday Times-bestselling broadcaster takes us on a global exploration of ancestral beauty practices, revealing how mainstream Eurocentric beauty standards evolved and how minoritised groups can transcend them by reclaiming their cultural roots. Our bodies tell our story. Upon turning forty, Afua Hirsch had an encounter...
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Description
The Sunday Times-bestselling broadcaster takes us on a global exploration of ancestral beauty practices, revealing how mainstream Eurocentric beauty standards evolved and how minoritised groups can transcend them by reclaiming their cultural roots.
Our bodies tell our story.
Upon turning forty, Afua Hirsch had an encounter that forever altered her preconceived notions of ancestry and body image, making her question everything from body-modification rituals such as tattoos and piercings to the foundations of sexuality.
Decolonising My Body charts her year-long journey of radical unlearning. Bringing together global scholarship, on-the-ground reportage, personal anecdotes and interviews with beauty experts, practitioners and service users, Hirsch reassesses notions of body image beyond those of the colonial, patriarchal gaze. Taking us from puberty to end-of-life, she shows us that the ways in which we adorn and present ourselves have spiritual implications and shape the possibilities we see for ourselves in the world.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781529954197
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 05 February 2026
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Vintage
Audience: General / adult, Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 18.0mm
Width: 129.0mm
Height: 197.0mm
Weight: 210g
Pages: 240
About the Author
Afua Hirsch is a writer, filmmaker, and journalist. She is the author of Brit(ish), the Sunday Times bestseller that explores Britishness, identity and belonging, for which she was awarded the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Prize for Non-Fiction. She co-presented Enslaved, a 6-part series about the transatlantic slave trade with Samuel L Jackson. She is the presenter of the Audible podcast series We Need To Talk About the British Empire, and Africa Rising, an ongoing flagship series about art and culture for the BBC, through her production company Born in Me Productions. She is a longtime columnist for the Guardian and is a professor of journalism at the University of Southern California.
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