New Growth

“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

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

"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

"As Cobb nimbly demonstrates, Black hair, in any form, invites the opportunity to appreciate the racial past in speculation of a liberated future that must be felt through." - Lauren Michele Jackson, American Literary History