Don’t Touch My Hair Audiobook (Free)

Straightened. Stigmatised. ‘Tamed’. Celebrated. Erased. Managed. Appropriated. Forever misinterpreted. Black hair is usually never ‘just hair’.

This book is about why black hair matters and how it could be seen as a blueprint for decolonisation. Emma Dabiri will take us from pre-colonial Africa, through the Harlem Renaissance, Black Power and to today’s Organic Hair Motion, the Social Appropriation Wars and beyond. We take a look at everything from hair capitalists like Madam C.J. Walker in the early 1900s towards the rise of Shea Moisture today, from women’s solidarity and a friendly relationship to ‘black people time’, forgotten African scholars and the dubious provenance of Kim Kardashian’s braids.

The scope of black hairstyling ranges from pop culture to cosmology, from prehistoric times to the (afro)futuristic. Uncovering sophisticated indigenous mathematical systems in dark hairstyles, alongside styles that offered as secret cleverness systems leading enslaved Africans to freedom, Don’t Touch My Hair shows that far from being only hair, black hairstyling tradition can be comprehended as an allegory for dark oppression and, ultimately, liberation.