Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia

Abstract

Not long ago, I attended a performance in San Francisco by women presently or formerly incarcerated in county jail in collaboration with Bay Area women performance artists. After show, I went backstage to green room, where women inmates, guarded by deputy sheriffs stationed outside door, were celebrating with their families and friends. Having worked with some of women at jail, I wanted to congratulate them on show. One woman introduced me to her brother who at first responded to my name with a blank stare. The woman admonished him: don't know who Davis is?! You should be ashamed. Suddenly a flicker of recognition flashed across his face. Oh, he said, Angela Davis-the Afro. Such responses I find are hardly exceptional, and it is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo. It is humiliating because it reduces a politics of liberation to a politics of fashion; it is humbling because such encounters with younger generation demonstrate fragility and mutability of historical images, particularly those associated with African American history. This encounter with young man who identified me as the reminded me of a recent article in New York Times Magazine that listed me as one of fifty most influential fashion (read: hairstyle) trendsetters over last century.' I continue to find it ironic that popularity of Afro is