Papers presented by Jason Petrulis since 2019

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

"“Making a Global Beauty Business: The Rise and Fall of Hong Kong Wigs in the 1960s”"

Abstract:

This paper examines how an inter-Asian, trans-Pacific, and global commodity network was forged in and through Hong Kong during the 1960s-70s. It uses a surprising commodity – the human-hair and synthetic fiber wig – as a lens on the geographies of Cold War commerce. At a time when Hong Kong shifted from entrepôt to producer, wigs were critical to growth – the colony’s #4 export, employing more than 30,000 people. And wigs were a genuinely global commodity: hair was collected in Indonesia and India, flown to South Korea and Hong Kong to be manufactured into wigs using British materials and Belgian techniques and French hairstyles, and flown again to the US and Europe to be sold and worn. Yet this paper also uses the Hong Kong wig to argue against the idea of a dematerialized, post-Fordist capitalism. Though forces of “globalization” such as air cargo seemed to redraw borders, placing Chennai next to China, this paper argues that capitalism did not collapse distances so completely. Instead, it emphasizes the materiality of commodities that were transported by air, and highlights the difficulties in linking, say, Madras to Hong Kong by plane. Moreover, the wig suggests that it can be misleading to think about 1960s-70s Hong Kong as a bounded physical space containing a distinct political/economic system. Instead, capitalist Hong Kong often overspilled its boundaries: in a global commodity network like the wig network, it was not just capital but also people, things, equipment, and embodied ideas that had to be moved and connected across borders, distributing “Hong Kong” physically across the globe. Indeed, this paper argues that we can understand the big-picture forces of globalization in Cold War Asia only by focusing on the people – from petty bureaucrats to factory workers to wig wearers – who worked on the ground to make Hong Kong global.