Natural

Ambitious in scope, this book interweaves personal, historical, political, and transnational reflections about Black women’s hair and beauty culture... provocative. * Kirkus Reviews * Natural takes readers on a journey across four continents to examine Black women’s hair care. Chelsea Mary Elise Johnson offers fresh insights on topics such as Black femininity, texturism, and the technologies of resistance. This book is a blueprint for studying the natural hair movement in the age of social media. * Tanisha C. Ford, author of Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl's Love Letter to the Power of Fashion * Johnson says something new and unprecedented about the ‘natural hair movement.’ Love and nuance colors every page of her book, and we need both to appreciate the beautiful hard-won truths of Black women’s pursuit and engagement with their own ‘natural’ hair. I implore you to read this book! * Lanita Jacobs, author of From the Kitchen to the Parlor: Language and Becoming in African American Women’s Hair Care * From Atlanta to Johannesburg Black women are constructing a new body politics as they create and sell products, share techniques, flaunt their locs, and debate who belongs in the natural hair movement. Natural explores the meaning and politics of natural hair in the twenty-first century. This nuanced study of the politics of Black women's hair makes important contributions to studies of race, gender and embodiment. * Maxine Leeds Craig, author of Ain't I a Beauty Queen?: Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race * Natural is an achievement, a cartography, and a love letter to contemporary Black beauty culture. This needed book crosses theoretical, disciplinary, and national borders to stitch together a diasporic, intersectional, and layered archive of the contemporary natural hair movement. In charting this movement, Johnson helps us understand ‘going natural’ in relation to longer struggles for racial justice, Black liberation, bodily autonomy, and ‘Black lives mattering.’ This book is a needed intervention that will be cited for years to come. * Kristin Denise Rowe, author of the forthcoming book “It’s the Feelings I Wear”: Black Women, Natural Hair, and New Media (Re)Negotiations of Beauty * Natural is a magnificent text. Johnson presents a remarkably insightful discussion of the natural hair movement through analyses that center embodiment, texturism, neoliberalism, entrepreneurship, and the green movement. By recognizing the natural hair movement as one that challenges mainstream conceptualizations of social movements, Natural will impress a broad audience. * Ingrid Banks, author of Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women's Consciousness * Natural presents a timely and multifaceted discussion of natural hair culture and politics that speaks to scholars and students of social movements, gender, beauty culture, and embodiment... Most illuminating is [Johnson's] engagement with women in their sixties who help detangle the distinction between earlier and contemporary moments in Black hair politics. * Ethnic and Racial Studies *