Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul

Abstract

Tanisha C. Ford's Liberated Threads is a welcome addition to historical studies of civil rights and black power. Through case studies drawn from the United States, Great Britain, and South Africa, Liberated Threads focuses on the history and politics of “soul style” and examines how black women used fashion and beauty culture to express themselves in an era when blackness and black womanhood were being actively reimagined. Liberated Threads traces the emergence of soul style while zeroing in on the quotidian histories of black women activists (p. 10). How did these women's style choices reflect their needs and experiences in this era? Conversely, how did black women “style” themselves as newly liberated black and female subjects in a period of rupture and change? Liberated Threads approaches style as a cultural practice closely tied to political activism. Ford's eclectic, transnational archive, which draws from newspapers, magazines, photographs, lp covers, and interviews, allows her to capture the dynamism of familiar signifiers of soul style. In the opening chapters, for example, Ford examines the history of the “natural”—later, the Afro—as a popular hairstyle for black women, noting its different resonances in varying political and national contexts. The South African singer Miriam Makeba's short natural came to signify radical black glamour, but it also referenced the Bantu education system, which forced black South African girls to shed their distinctive plaits and cornrows once they entered school. In contrast, African American political activists in the 1960s embraced the natural as a critique of European beauty standards and a refusal to conform to stifling norms of black bourgeois femininity.