New Growth Cobb

New Growth

The Art and Texture of Black Hair JASMINE NICHOLE COBB

“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.”—C. RILEY SNORTON, author of Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity

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 Afrotextured coiffure, exploring it as a visual material through which to reimagine the sensual experience of Blackness. Through close readings of slave narratives, scrapbooks, travel illustration, documentary film 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 hair style alongside cosmetics 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.

THE VISUAL ARTS OF AFRICA AND ITS DIASPORAS A series edited by Kellie Jones and Steven Nelson

“Afro sheen stays on the case.” Advertisement, Ebony, January 1969.

January 2023 216 pages,

78 illustrations, including 32 in color paper, 978-1-4780-1907-7 $24.95/£18.99 cloth, 978-1-4780-1643-4 $94.95/£76.00

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