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EPISODE 10 | NEW GROWTH: IN CONVERSATION WITH JASMINE NICHOLE COBB

In this episode we talk to Jasmine Nichole Cobb, about her latest book, titled New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair forthcoming in December from Duke University Press. The book explores how Afro-textured hair as a surface upon which black liberation is represented from slavery to the present day. We talk to Jasmine about how she thinks about hair in relation to scholarly work on the notion of the flesh, about how hair is connected to feeling both in the tactile and affective sense, and about how it functions as a form of representation and black visual culture. 

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In conversation with:

Jasmine Nichole Cobb (Duke University, Durham, USA)

Jasmine Nichole Cobb is Professor of African and African American Studies and of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. She is a scholar of Black visual culture and the author of Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century, 2015 and is the editor of African American Literature in Transition, 1800-1830, published in 2021, and most recently, New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair forthcoming in December from Duke University Press. In addition, she has curated artist talks, lectures and public events on Black representation in her role as a co-director of the “From Slavery to Freedom” Franklin Humanities Lab at Duke University.

You can find the introduction to the book here.

References:

  • Cobb, Jasmine Nichole. Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century. New York University Press. 2015
  • Cobb, Jasmine Nichole. New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair. Duke University Press, 2023 
  • Cordier, Charles-Henri-Joseph. Venus Africaine. 1852. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.
  • Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America. WW Norton & Company, 2022.
  • Harwood, Francis. Bust of a Man, 1758, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT.
  • Mercer, Kobena. “Black Hair/ Style Politics”. Black British Culture and Society. Routledge. 1999
  • O’Grady, Lorraine. “Landscape Western Hemisphere”. You can view the work here.
  • Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 65-81
  • Weheliye, Alexander. G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke University Press. 2014
  • Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument.” CR: The new centennial review 3.3 (2003): 257-337.