This article attempts to relativise the nationalism of Chinese-speaking Muslims, which has tended to be overemphasized in previous studies, focusing on a movement in which Muslims in North China cut off their braids or queues––Manchu men's traditional hairstyle imposed on Chinese people under the Qing rule––and related debates among the Muslim elite before and after the Xinhai Revolution. This study has implications for the historiography of South African migration and immigration policy, state formation and transnationalism. The conclusion argues that these dynamics have persisted into the present. These six chapters throw into sharp relief the themes of pragmatic, strategic permissiveness and administrative incapacity amid restrictionist tendencies in the making of South Africa's international borders. The dissertation culminates with the history of ‘Tropical’ African tramping gangs whose durable systems of irregular migration ensured the idiosyncratic border management system flopped and fragmented until the 1950s and beyond. ![]() Border settlers flew sent into acute panic but for, for reasons detailed, the administrative response was erratic and reluctant. Fifth, we elicit the movements of an eclectic assortment of border folk - refugees, farmhands, migrant workers, wandering prophets and beer drinkers, among others, who provoked, wittingly or not, rumours of an imminent ‘native uprising’. They exploited exemptions for women travellers and 'tourist' concessions. Fourth, we examine networked ‘guilds’ of poor white female dancers and hostesses who travelled to and fro the nightclubs of Beira & Lourenço Marques. They prove a rule about how migrants won concessions through extravagant performances of honour, reputation and begging. Third, we reflect on a globe-trotting fraternity of Assyrian bogus priests who made several tours of South Africa. Second, we follow capital-generating stowaway/smuggling syndicates from Madeira who established popular border-crossing enterprises through Portuguese East Africa and Swaziland. First, we consider scandals of white Immigration Department clerks who colluded with south Asian merchants in the sale of fraudulent identity documentation. Exploring new sources and digital research methods, the argument is developed through six thematic chapters. This study, then, is partly a history of South African state-making, and partly a social history of how transnational migrants negotiate long-distance mobility within certain structural constraints and opportunities. This, in turn, galvanised reforms in the border regime, but border-control systems were never foolproof. As a result, subaltern migrants developed their own vernacular responses to colonial power. Anti-alienist hopes for an impermeable, coercive border regime were often undermined by strategic permissiveness and chaotic incapacity at the local level. This dissertation argues that early twentieth-century South Africa, straddling both Indian and Atlantic Ocean migrant networks, developed a restrictive but ultimately ambiguous international border-control system that resourceful migrants learned to manipulate. Exploring the verbal and visual discourses of Chinese hair imports and pertinent hairstyles in early popular American periodicals, this article uses feminist theories, critical race feminisms, fashion and beauty theories, and Asian American studies to broaden critical insights into gendered and racialized traditions of exclusion. ![]() During the era, media sensationalism surrounding the pompadour’s incorporation of Chinese tresses, especially male “pigtails,” spawned questions and anxieties around domesticity and consumption, national belonging and exclusion. At the same time, however, the Gibson Girl phenomenon pivoted on participation in mass consumerism, and a reliable supplement of hair via imports from China. Chinese hair imports were essential to building the age’s signature pompadour hairstyle popularized by the iconic Gibson Girl, an early version of the New Woman linked to fantasies of the white American nation-state and national boundaries. As Sinophobia swept across the country, hundreds of editorials and illustrated news items on “artificial” hair from China circulated nationwide in such publications as the New York Times, San Francisco Call, and Cosmopolitan. This article examines Chinese hair imports in the text and imagery of popular American newspapers and magazines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, overlapping the first federal restrictions on Chinese immigration.
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