The first half of this book was very interesting. The author makes connections between black hair and black art, traditional culture, pop culture and history. Her ideas felt fresh and interesting. She began to lose me in the second half where her opinions became cliché and cavil. There was a distinct switch in the tone and at times it bordered on whining. The second half wasn't an enjoyable read for me, but I feel the author deserves credit for the presentation of her thoughts and for her concise writing. ( )

A fascinating and powerful read, Don't Touch My Hair looks at the history, culture, and politics which surround Black hair, and the ways in which white people have stigmatised (and continue to stigmatise) Afro-textured hair. It's a book about why Black hair matters.

Emma Dabiri—born to a white Irish woman and an ethnically Yoruba Nigerian man, and raised mostly in Ireland—engages with both parts of her heritage, demonstrating the stunning fractal complexity of the indigenous Yoruba hairstyles known as irun didi and irun kiko and the casually brutal racism of her upbringing in '90s inner city Dublin. There's more than enough in either topic to fill a book, but Dabiri also tackles issues of cultural appropriation, colonialism, Eurocentric beauty standards, indigenous African mathematical traditions, and analysis of cultural power. There's a lot going on here, in other words, and I could see this sparking a lot of good discussion in an undergraduate classroom or a book group.

There are times when Dabiri's use of academic terms/concepts sits uneasily alongside her deployment of netspeak (using "lol" in print always looks asinine to me), and I wished she'd defined and unpacked some of the terms she'd used more. ("Western" in Don't Touch My Hair sometimes means "white" and sometimes means "European" and sometimes means "Anglophone northwestern Europe and North America" and sometimes it means a much more diffuse set of ideologies and aesthetics linked to Protestantism and capitalism. To say that western views of time are more linear and predicated on privileging notions of "change"/"progress" than African ones may be true in the aggregate in the twenty-first century, or in comparison to say many Native American systems of time. But that's not universally true. Dabiri's Irish; she surely knows why we talk about an athbhliain rather than a nuabhliain. The specificities of power and context matter.)

However, none of that ultimately dilutes the power of a book which is so resonant and so clear in its call for a shift in the terms of the dominant conversations. High recommended. ( )