On the Lived Theology Reading List: Liberated Threads


Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul, Tanisha C. FordBlack Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul

In Liberated Threads, winner of the 2016 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award, author Tanisha C. Ford explores how and why black women in places as far-flung as New York City, Atlanta, London, and Johannesburg incorporated style and beauty culture into their activism. Focusing on the emergence of the “soul style” movement—represented in clothing, jewelry, hairstyles, and more—Liberated Threads shows that black women’s fashion choices became galvanizing symbols of gender and political liberation. Drawing from an eclectic archive, Ford offers a new way of studying how black style and Soul Power moved beyond national boundaries, sparking a global fashion phenomenon.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“Creates a fierce and vibrant dialog on the rarely recounted women’s perspective on black style, beauty, and soul.”—Library Journal, starred review

“A scholarly masterpiece that squarely situates fashion as central to the US civil rights and Black Power eras.”—Winterthur Portfolio

“Ambitious and wide-ranging. . . . Makes a powerful and convincing case for how black women practiced the politics of civil rights, black power, and anticolonialism by crafting new, self-affirming appearances and fashions.”—American Historical Review

For more information on the publication, click here.

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