New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair

by Jasmine Nichole Cobb

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478023708
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	11/11/2022
Series:	The Visual Arts of Africa and its Diasporas
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	76 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Jasmine Nichole Cobb is Professor of African and African American Studies and of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations  viii
Acknowledgments  xiii
Introduction. New Growth: Black Hair and Liberation  1
1. Archive: Slavery, Sentiment, and Feeling  25
2. Texture: The Coarseness of Racial Capitalism  57
3. Touch: Camera Images and Contact Revisions  97
4. Surface: The Art of Black Hair  131
Conclusion. Crowning Gestures  155
Notes  161
Bibliography  177
Index  193

What People are Saying About This

No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity - Sarah Haley

“In this brilliantly conceived and groundbreaking book, Jasmine Nichole Cobb provides startling new insights about the entanglements of Black hair with the archive, the political, and the visual. New Growth will surprise and linger with readers, and it will make a highly influential contribution to gender studies, cultural studies, visual studies, and Black studies for years to come.”

Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity - C. Riley Snorton

“With verve and panache, Jasmine Nichole Cobb moves across a stunning archive and a wide swath of surprising and eclectic materials in the study of Black hair. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, New Growth is particularly useful for thinking through the aesthetics of freedom, the relationship between surface and interiority, the haptics of racism, the sensations of flesh, and the limitations of slavery capitalism for understanding Black value.”