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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
[Introduction To] Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, Bertram D. Ashe
[Introduction To] Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, Bertram D. Ashe
Bookshelf
In Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, professor Bert Ashe delivers a witty, fascinating, and unprecedented account of black male identity as seen through our culture's perceptions of hair. It is a deeply personal story that weaves together the cultural and political history of dreadlocks with Ashe's own mid-life journey to lock his hair.
After leading a far-too-conventional life for forty years, Ashe began a long, arduous, uncertain process of locking his own hair in an attempt to step out of American convention. Black hair, after all, matters. Few Americans are subject to snap judgements like those in the African-American community, …
Invisible Dread, From Twisted: The Dreadlock Chronicles, Bertram D. Ashe
Invisible Dread, From Twisted: The Dreadlock Chronicles, Bertram D. Ashe
English Faculty Publications
This excerpt traces the issues and process surrounding the dreadlocking of an African-American professor's hair. The personal history leading up to the decision to grow locks is briefly addressed, as is the experience of getting twisted for the first time and some reactions to the new hairstyle. Twisted discusses issues of cultural authenticity and academic nonconformity. It examines dreadlocks as a pathway to explore black identity, but in opposing ways: the act of locking ones hair does display unconventional blackness - but it also participates in a preexisting black style. To what extent, the excerpt asks, can the adoption of …