Twisted
The Tangled History of Black Hair Culture
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5.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
A Kirkus Best Book of the Year
Stamped from the Beginning meets You Can't Touch My Hair in this timely and
resonant essay collection from Guardian contributor and prominent BBC race correspondent Emma Dabiri, exploring the ways in which black hair has been
appropriated and stigmatized throughout history, with ruminations on body
politics, race, pop culture, and Dabiri’s own journey to loving her hair.
Emma Dabiri can tell you the first time she chemically
straightened her hair. She can describe the smell, the atmosphere of the salon,
and her mix of emotions when she saw her normally kinky tresses fall down her
shoulders. For as long as Emma can remember, her hair has been a source of
insecurity, shame, and—from strangers and family alike—discrimination. And she
is not alone.
Despite increasingly liberal world views, black hair
continues to be erased, appropriated, and stigmatized to the point of taboo.
Through her personal and historical journey, Dabiri gleans insights into the
way racism is coded in society’s perception of black hair—and how it is often
used as an avenue for discrimination. Dabiri takes us from pre-colonial Africa,
through the Harlem Renaissance, and into today's Natural Hair Movement,
exploring everything from women's solidarity and friendship, to the
criminalization of dreadlocks, to the dubious provenance of Kim Kardashian's
braids.
Through the lens of hair texture, Dabiri leads us on a
historical and cultural investigation of the global history of racism—and her
own personal journey of self-love and finally, acceptance.
Deeply researched and powerfully resonant, Twisted proves
that far from being only hair, black hairstyling culture can be
understood as an allegory for black oppression and, ultimately, liberation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
BBC correspondent Dabiri debuts with a lively and wide-ranging essay collection combining history, memoir, political jeremiad, cultural criticism, and social science. Growing up in Ireland with an Irish mother and a Nigerian father, Dabiri was "made to feel like an abomination," whose "tightly coiled hair" presented "a problem that needed to be managed." She describes early efforts to disguise her real hair ("from weaves, to extensions, to Jheri curls, curly perms, straight perms, and straighteners") as "bid for assimilation," and explores the history of black hair from traditional African braided hairstyles to the use of painful "cotton cards" to comb the hair of enslaved children in antebellum America and the rise of chemical hair straightening and skin lightening products during the early 1900s. Dabiri also examines black masculinity through the lens of a "high-profile rap beef" between Drake and Pusha T, documents cultural appropriation by white artists including Fred Astaire and Madonna, and revisits a 2017 advertising campaign that employed "the language of struggle and the overcoming of adversity" to market natural hair products to white women. Dabiri explores both her personal story and the larger history with a fierce sense of purpose and an appealing eclecticism, though her prose rarely sings. Readers will be fascinated by how deeply the story of the African diaspora is intertwined in changing attitudes toward black hair.
