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I engage diverse images—television, film, and fine art—using my expertise to uncover intricate nuances of visual representation. My books explore and critique drawing, film, sculpture, photography, painting, and print, connecting contemporary events to historical contexts.
New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair
From Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis, “natural hair” has been associated with the Black freedom struggle. In New Growth Jasmine Nichole Cobb traces the history of Afro-textured coiffure, exploring it as a visual material through which to reimagine the sensual experience of Blackness. Through close readings of slave narratives, scrapbooks, travel illustrations, documentary films, and photography as well as collage, craft, and sculpture, from the nineteenth century to the present, Cobb shows how the racial distinctions ascribed to people of African descent become simultaneously visible and tactile.
picture freedom: remaking black visuality in the transatlantic parlor
In the decades leading up to the end of U.S. slavery, many free Blacks sat for daguerreotypes decorated in fine garments to document their self-possession. People pictured in these early photographs used portraiture to seize control over representation of the free Black body and reimagine Black visuality divorced from the cultural logics of slavery. In Picture Freedom, Jasmine Nichole Cobb analyzes the ways in which the circulation of various images prepared free Blacks and free Whites for the emancipation of formerly unfree people of African descent. She traces the emergence of Black freedom as both an idea and as an image during the early nineteenth century.
african american literature in transition, vol. 2
The quest for freedom is a driving force of African American literature produced in the thirty-year period between 1800 and 1830.