Books like Hair story by Ayana Byrd

Margo Jefferson recounts her upbringing in Chicago’s black elite, tracing how the cultural and social dynamics of ‘Negroland’ shaped her life amid the civil rights movement, feminism, and the myth of postracial America.

For over two centuries, in the North as well as the South, both within their own community and in the public arena, African Americans have presented their bodies in culturally distinctive ways. Shane White and Graham White consider the deeper significance of the ways in which African Americans have dressed, walked, danced, arranged their hair, and communicated in silent gestures. They ask what elaborate hair styles, bright colors, bandanas, long watch chains, and zoot suits, for example, have really meant, and discuss style itself as an expression of deep-seated cultural imperatives. Their wide-ranging exploration of black style from its African origins to the 1940s reveals a culture that differed from that of the dominant racial group in ways that were often subtle and elusive. A wealth of black-and-white illustrations show the range of African American experience in America, emanating from all parts of the country, from cities and farms, from slave plantations, and Chicago beauty contests. White and White argue that the politics of black style is, in fact, the politics of metaphor, always ambiguous because it is always indirect. To tease out these ambiguities, they examine extensive sources, including advertisements for runaway slaves, interviews recorded with surviving ex-slaves in the 1930s, autobiographies, travelers' accounts, photographs, paintings, prints, newspapers, and images drawn from popular culture, such as the stereotypes of Jim Crow and Zip Coon.

"The exhibition, Hair in African Art and Culture, and this book serve to introduce a mode of African art too little and too infrequently recognized or appreciated. Field photographs and sculptures sample the rich variety of hair arrangements that exist or have existed in traditional African life and art. Despite the many references to the abstract character of African masks and figures it is clear that two areas of the real world were accurately, indeed realistically, depicted: scarification and coiffures.". "Essays and notes address a number of aspects of African and African-American hair and collectively hint at the variety, complex meanings and history of hair styles. Some of the essays are personal, some present the nature of coiffures in the cycle of life: from birth to death, from celebration to mourning." "In traditional and modern Africa, and the African-American diaspora, hair styles establish a personal identity that reflects both fashion and aesthetic choice."--BOOK JACKET.

"Black is Beautiful!" The words were the exuberant rallying cry of a generation of black women who threw away their straightening combs and adopted a proud new style they called the Afro. The Afro, as worn most famously by Angela Davis, became a veritable icon of the Sixties.Although the new beauty standards seemed to arise overnight, they actually had deep roots within black communities. Tracing her story to 1891, when a black newspaper launched a contest to find the most beautiful woman of the race, Maxine Leeds Craig documents how black women have negotiated theintersection of race, class, politics, and personal appearance in their lives. Craig takes the reader from beauty parlors in the 1940s to late night political meetings in the 1960s to demonstrate the powerful influence of social movements on the experience of daily lifev