In New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair, Jasmine Nichole Cobb sets an ambitious pair of goals: a) to write a new story about visual representations of Black hair and their role in shaping African American identity over the last two centuries and b) to invite her readers to reconsider their approaches to thinking and writing about Black hair by focusing on the ways in which that hair is not just represented but also lived and experienced.

A key element of New Growth is Cobb’s interest in the “haptic” qualities of Black hair. The touch, texture, and feeling of natural hair, she contends, are key components of “a palpable Black raciality” (4), one often examined in intimate encounters that link hair with sensuality. Evidently, in an image or artwork, Black hair is contemplated through not just seeing but also touching—or, more often, imagined touching (though this imaginative element of haptic interactions with or curiosity about Black hair is a topic that Cobb could examine more thoroughly).

Cobb not only focuses on visual representations of Black hair, but also states an intention “To think of Black hair as visual material culture” (9) in and of itself, too. This approach connects with the work of scholars who have analyzed fashion, costuming, tattooing, piercing, and other types of corporeal display and alteration as visual culture over the last half century, including the writings of scholars such as: Tameka Ellington in Textures: The History and Art of Black Hair (2002), Kobena Mercer in “Black Hair/Style Politics” (1987), and Roy Seiber in Hair in African Art and Culture (2020), on Black hair, and Tanisha Ford’s analysis of sartorial display among Black women (Liberated Threads, UNC Press, 2015), among many others. Cobb’s method likewise engages with historians of Black material cultures who have focused on unconventional media to uncover and analyze Black agency in a world that has long discouraged and ignored African American creative expression. This choice makes the decision to focus a book on visual cultures of Black hair more than an exhortation to pay more attention to an often ignored element of objects like nineteenth-century photographs, seventies shampoo advertisements, or works by contemporary Black artists—it is also an invitation to scholars to think more expansively about the subjects of their analysis and the means by which Black people have sought to express identity. Finally, it may, too, be an opportunity to recenter everyday people, be they artistic subjects or simply growers of Black hair, as subjects of scholarly analysis.

In many ways the book seems to dwell most of all on what Cobb at one point, while discussing contemporary artist Lorna Simpson’s work, describes as “the ongoing production of blackness, showing that raciality is not simply a final form of visibility but an ongoing making” (142). As a document and series of analyses of such making, New Growth is impressive. It encompasses dozens and dozens of examples, with Cobb moving smoothly from one to the next, capably describing the particular perspective that a given representation seems to convey and, often, how it connects to the social circumstances surrounding its making. The first chapter explores a period from the 1790s to the 1870s during which the perception of Black hair was often shaped by the enslaved status of many of those who grew it, articulating an argument that such hair often became a material record that was used by some, like racial pseudoscientists Henry Benjamin Latrobe and Peter Arrell Browne, to convey or enforce racist ideologies, and others, including Black leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Harriett Tubman, to fight against such beliefs and to care for and love one another. Frequently focusing on a central example of Douglass’s hair and representations thereof, Cobb locates in his distinctive self-styling the roots of a long history of resistance against discrimination and oppression.

From there the book leaps forward in time, focusing on “the means by which people of African descent revisited and revised haptic blackness” (61) amidst a period of renewed Black social awareness and activism stretching from the 1960s onward. After highlighting the ongoing interest in Douglass and his hair in the mid-to-late 20th century as a way of transitioning to this later period, the examples used across the remaining chapters range widely, including 1970s TV advertisements for Black hair products that featured an actor playing Douglass, news photographs of members of the MOVE organization in Philadelphia, and works by contemporary artists like Sonya Clark and Alison Saar that explicitly thematize the topics of Black hair’s natural qualities and the potential cultural meanings of its styling. It is the aggregation of the many examples that Cobb incorporates across these chapters that perhaps sends New Growth’s most powerful message. We see in them the expansiveness of the topic that she is working to address: the immense meaning of Black hair and its visual representation to countless people and communities across the United States and around the world. In the period since the 1960s, she makes clear, hair has played a central role in “the ongoing production of blackness” as a form of community and identity across cultures, ideologies, and media.

However, in between these two periods, the Antebellum/Civil War/Reconstruction eras focused on in chapter one and the period since the 1970s that is the subject of most of the remainder of the book, we glimpse, perhaps, the divide between the two areas of study that have encompassed most of Cobb’s published work (that is, early- to mid-nineteenth-century US visual culture and African American popular visual culture of the recent past). In between these chapters sits the gulf of nearly a century of history, one that roughly coincides with the Jim Crow Era, when racist notions about the supposed physical differences between racial groups ran rampant and Black people were often represented through the lens of bigoted stereotypes that sought to dehumanize them, frequently through focus on physical attributes like the shape and texture of Black hair. Though referenced at certain points in the book, missing, too, is close examination of an early-twentieth-century period when Black beauty and hair care became big business thanks to the efforts of entrepreneurs like Madam C.J. Walker. Importantly, this period that is not closely examined in New Growth is also the era in which mass visual culture exploded in the United States, and novel visual media, from new kinds of newspaper and magazine illustrations to film and television technologies, began to share visual representations of Black people at a mass scale never possible before. As this gap makes obvious, New Growth does not aspire to comprehensiveness. While Cobb makes frequent reference to the role of the slavery era in shaping conceptions of Black hair that have endured until the present day, the lack of attention to the many changes in Black hairstyling and new forms of representation of Black coiffure across the missing period leave an incomplete story and a gap that is largely unexplained.

A possible related problem is the undertheorization of whiteness in New Growth. To be clear, this is not a topic that Cobb totally ignores, and, after all, it makes sense to focus on Blackness in a book about Black hair, especially when discussing topics like the growing pride in natural hair as a symbol of Black identity in the sixties and seventies or contemporary artists’ insights on the many meanings of Black hairstyles in the twenty-first century. This decision likewise aligns her with the traditional focus on Black subjectivity and agency among Black Studies scholars. However, while focusing on the role of white actors in manufacturing racial distinctions based on appearance arguably runs the risk of reaching obvious or redundant conclusions, I still wonder what a scholar of Cobb’s analytical prowess might make of some representations of Black hair that were used to encourage racial divides in the period between the 1870s and the 1960s. After all, the slavery era was not the only context that informed how African Americans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whether through the styling of their own hair or the representations they made of Black people, crafted identity through coiffure. The role of natural hair as an empowering symbol only made sense because Black hair and its representations had long played a role in anti-Blackness.

New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair, then, in addition to its many insights about the particular meanings of Black hairstyles in an impressive variety of cultural contexts and its offer of an analytical toolbox for thinking about Black (and, surely also, non-Black) hair and its visual representations as we encounter them elsewhere, is also notable as a monograph that is choosing the subjects of its inquiry selectively, and seemingly with no small degree of intention. The book begins with the statement that “A tentative freedom is tangled in Afro-textured hair” (1). In focusing principally on that freedom rather than the conditions that have made it tentative, or indeed produced the notion that natural Black hair should be seen as atypical at all, Cobb makes a potent choice—one that acknowledges and understands the heavy weight of a history of hate and manufactured difference, but chooses to instead focus on how Black people have turned these circumstances into an opportunity to find new forms of meaningful identity and joy and new paths for resistance.