The Will to Adorn - by Ayana Omilade Flewellen (Hardcover)

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Book Synopsis How Black women's everyday choices in personal adornment tell a story of navigating racial and sexual oppression after Emancipation Even amid the racialized servitude, sexual exploitation, and economic disenfranchisement of the post-Emancipation era in the American South, Black women dared to adorn themselves by styling their hair with combs, wearing necklaces crafted out of glass beads, and dyeing coarse cotton fabric with indigo-berry and sweetgum bark. In The Will to Adorn , Ayana Omilade Flewellen examines the material remains of Black women's sartorial strategies in these decades and argues that such "small finds" as beads, buttons, hairpins, brooches, and lace bobbins co…