100 Books Like Afros

Dabiri’s use of history and personal storytelling to deconstruct and illuminate the long story of Black hair is crucial in that it allows readers to understand that our Black hair has history. The movement against natural Black hair is rooted in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and our own structures of government have always backed the anti-blackness that criminalized, scapegoated, or invisibilized our hair; this book celebrates our natural hair but also serves as historical education, which is so important if we’re to see natural Black hair not as a stylish trend but as a necessary part of our liberation. Dabiri reminds us that, while our hair is so often used as a weapon against us, it also has the power to liberate us.

This is, to me, the “OG” of Black hair books in the last half-century. I discovered this book by accident a few years ago early one evening and ended up reading late into the night: page by page, Byrd and Tharps provide a first-rate history about natural Black hair. Learning about the hair customs of my ancestors before the onslaught of the Transatlantic Slave Trade made me proud of my curls and strengthened my resolve to continue their brilliant, necessary work on the roots of Black hair.

The narratives in this book from women in the United States, London, and Ghana--accompanied by gorgeous portraits--capture a slice of the Black hair diaspora and the place where it all started: West Africa. The title says it all and yet can’t begin to capture the gorgeous array of women, hairstyles, and lived experiences captured by Cunningham and Alexander.

Hair Love is a heartwarming and gentle book about a little girl named Zuri and her father struggling to do her hair. It is filled with an abundance of humorous and joyful moments, but where the book really shines for me is in its unabashed celebration of Zuri’s hair. In a country where Black femmes are constantly being labeled as less-than, the importance of this book cannot be overstated.

Jackson’s novel shuttles between present-day Oakland and the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival as music journalist Alonzo Reid remembers and recounts to his grown children how he met his now-deceased photographer wife, Ada. What I love about this book is the fact that although the family is grieving, so much joy infuses Ada’s memory. And while Back in the Day mourns a death and the end of one love story, it ends on a hopeful note and marks the beginning of a new chapter.

I found this book eye-opening; it forced me to rethink what I knew about Europe’s success.

We think of Europe (and the US) as being successful because of its culture, religion, democratic capitalism, and/or climate. Blaut challenges such Eurocentrist presumptions by documenting Europe’s geographical good fortune. It was much easier to reach the Americas from Europe than from its 15th-century Asian competitors (China and India), enabling Europe to overtake these by exploiting the Americas.

I came to realize that Europe’s prosperity, and that of its former white colonies (the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), was due to good luck, not simply European initiative.

Dr. Doherty, a Professor in the Department of Family Social Science and Director of the Citizen Professional Center at the University of Minnesota has long been a voice for questioning the manner in which the psychotherapy field avoids the moral/ethical issues presented by our clients. 

Some of these ethical issues are presented directly by clients; others maybe be unacknowledged by them, such as the moral issues around whether to engage in a secret affair or to withhold important information from partners, friends, or business associates in order to attain personal gain. 

From Freud onward, psychotherapists have been trained to adopt a stance of ethical neutrality, with an emphasis on maximizing the client’s individual happiness, even if this means pursuing goals that may negatively affect the lives of those with whom they have important relationships. 

This emphasis on personal happiness above all else draws upon the larger Western Eurocentric emphasis on… show more.

Chakrabarty’s monograph is a classic work of postcolonial theory.

Basically, it shows that despite their pretensions to universality, a lot of the humanities and social sciences have been founded on unexamined Eurocentric perspectives on world history. While modernity is often held up as a universal standard, Chakrabarty unmasks the widely held assumptions about “sovereignty,” “disenchanted space,” and “secular time,” as European constructs.

Famously, he also shows how the transition to capitalism was an act of translation that changed the way people saw the world and their relationship to each other. This book can be hard going, but it is very much crucial reading as it really undercuts some of the most widely held myths of modernity. 

Bell Hooks is a force! I was introduced to her work through women’s studies classes and loved how she saw the world and presented cultural critiques. This book really helped me look outside the lens of male Eurocentric art history. A series of essays, each one covering an artist, topic, or theory.

It’s been a while since I’ve reread any of them, but I remember that this is the book that helped me dive deeper into Carrie Mae Weems's photography–which I admire greatly. It had me contemplating the point of surrounding ourselves with beauty–and how people who have been told to abandon cultural objects of beauty can seek to find objects that truly heal and sustain our lives.

Perhaps the most influential essay to me was the one that outlined how male creatives were given the luxury of time and space to find and develop their practices and that women… show more.

A thousand years ago, a traveller to Baghdad, Constantinople, or China would find vast and flourishing cities of broad streets, spacious gardens, and sophisticated urban amenities; meanwhile, Paris, Rome, and London were cramped and unhygienic collections of villages. Europe was then a backwater. How, then, did it rise to world pre-eminence over the next several centuries? Having experienced China and its epic growth since being in Student in Shanghai in the early 1980s and then later as a banker, it seems there could be something to learn from history. Daly avoids the twin dangers of Eurocentrism and anti-Westernism, strongly emphasizing the contributions of other cultures of the world, as well as the vibrant and internal competition among cities and nations of Europe.