New Growth
The Art and Texture of Black Hair
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Duke University Press
Published:30th Dec '22
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
From Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis, “natural hair” has been associated with the Black freedom struggle. In New Growth Jasmine Nichole Cobb traces the history of Afro-textured coiffure, exploring it as a visual material through which to reimagine the sensual experience of Blackness. Through close readings of slave narratives, scrapbooks, travel illustrations, documentary films, and photography as well as collage, craft, and sculpture, from the nineteenth century to the present, Cobb shows how the racial distinctions ascribed to people of African descent become simultaneously visible and tactile. Whether examining Soul Train’s and Ebony’s promotion of the Afro hairstyle alongside styling products or how artists such as Alison Saar and Lorna Simpson underscore the construction of Blackness through the representation of hair, Cobb foregrounds the inseparability of Black hair’s look and feel. Demonstrating that Blackness is palpable through appearance and feeling, Cobb reveals the various ways that people of African descent forge new relationships to the body, public space, and visual culture through the embrace of Black hair.
"This book is important for anyone interested in symbolism and Black hair (primarily in the American context) with transferability to wider audiences interested in the visual and cultural production of Black bodies through hair practice. Above all, New Growth reminds us, hair is not just an aesthetic; it is form, materiality, symbol, performance and embodied racial construction." - Sweta Rajan-Rankin (Ethnic and Racial Studies) "[Cobb's] analytical savvy pushes readers to think about research that centers Black hair in ways that have been lacking in previous studies. This is what great scholars do. . . . New Growth captures this history by telling the story of how we got to this moment and how we might imagine haptic Black futures. For that, Cobb is to be thanked, and her groundbreaking text, celebrated." - Ingrid Banks (American Historical Review) "New Growth, free of jargon and full of insightful analyses, is a vital history of images and ideas of and about the naturalness of Black hair. Readers interested in the histories of hairdressing and self-fashioning; Black entrepreneurship and publishing in the personal care industry; design aesthetics; Black Power imagery in magazines, film, and television; and recent scholarship on 'surfacism' and visual sensation will find this book especially helpful." - Tiffany E. Barber (Art Bulletin)
ISBN: 9781478019077
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 408g
216 pages