Twisted: The Tangled History of Black Hair and Culture

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[s] 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. (May)