Bert Ashe, “Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles” (Agate Bolden, 2015)

What’s missing from contemporary discussions of aesthetics and representation within the natural hair movement? Bert Ashe generously offers a response in Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, an unprecedented account of black male identity as seen through our culture’s perceptions of hair. In this personal story that weaves together the cultural and political history of dreadlocks with the authors own mid-life journey to lock his hair, Ashe addresses the significance of black hair in the 20th and 21st centuries through an engaging and humorous literary style. Professor Ashe’s research focuses on late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literature and culture. He teaches and writes about contemporary American culture, primarily post-Civil Rights Movement African American literature and culture (often referred to as post-blackness or the post-soul aesthetic), as well as the black vernacular triumvirate of black hair, basketball, and jazz. His first book, From Within the Frame: Storytelling in African-American Fiction (Routledge, 2002) tracks the development of the African American frame text, from Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman through John Edgar Wideman’s Doc’s Story. Dr. Bert Ashe is Associate Professor of English at the University of Richmond.

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