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WORK TITLE: Liberated Threads
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.tanishacford.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.history.udel.edu/tanishaford/ * https://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/umass-amherst%E2%80%99s-tanisha-ford-explores * http://diverseeducation.com/article/65449/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Indiana University Bloomington, B.A., 2002, Ph.D., 2011; University of Wisconsin-Madison, M.A., 2005.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and academic. University of Massachusetts Amherst, assistant professor. University of Delaware, associate professor. The Feminist Wire, contributing editor. Lecturer at numerous institutions, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Delaware Historical Society, Parson’s The New School for Design, and Ritsumeikan University.
WRITINGS
Contributor to numerous periodicals, including New York Times, Root, New Yorker, Ebony, and NPR: Code Switch.
SIDELIGHTS
Tanisha C. Ford is a writer and associate professor of black American studies and history at the University of Delaware. Previously, she was assistant professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research and teaching interests center around black women’s history, fashion and body politics, gender and social movements, black feminist theory, youth cultures, and global popular cultures. Ford is particularly interested in the emergence of the African-inspired style of dress and hairstyling that arose in the 1960s and 1970s.
Ford received her B.A. and Ph.D. from Indiana University Bloomington and her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to teaching, she is a contributing editor to the Web log The Feminist Wire and posts regularly on Facebook and Twitter. Ford lives in New York City.
Ford’s debut book, Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul, examines the ways in which black women have historically used hair and clothing as instruments of resistance. The focus of the book is ‘soul style,’ a term Ford coins to describe the African-influenced style that emerged in the United States, England, and some countries in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. Writing on the Web site Essays in History, Alyssa Lopez explained that through historical documentation as well as photographs ranging from fashion magazines to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) files, “Ford thoroughly bridges the fields of fashion studies and civil rights movement history, illustratively demonstrating how women deliberately incorporated beauty and fashion into their activism.”
The soul style that Ford describes varies regionally, but is defined by a meeting between fashion and activism. Originating in the 1950s, this style is often most recognizable because of its African influence. In Greenwich Village and the Harlem neighborhoods of New York City, soul music was highly influential in informing soul style, as well as sometimes misinformed concepts of what African women wore. In the South, black women presented soul style by adopting clothing of the rural working class, responding to the reality that they could not adequately perform activism work when expected to spend significant time on hair and make-up upkeep.
The first section of the book details the emergence of soul style and regional differences of its definition, while the second section discusses the mainstream adoption of soul style. Ford explains how soul style served as a way to create community among black women, an experience that was undermined with appropriation by the mainstream fashion industry. The final section of the book examines international expressions of soul style. Ford explains how black women pushed gender boundaries in England, dressing in masculine ways in an attempt to overcome sexism. She describes how soul style ultimately found its way to Africa, from where it originated. In South Africa, soul style could mean activism or an attempt among African women to adopt modern styles from the United States or Great Britain. Ford suggests that either intention still resulted in a form of activism, as popularizing African styles acted to undermine apartheid restrictions and racism.
Writing in Choice, P.D. Hopkins recommended Ford’s work, observing: “While most blacks were not involved in formal political organizing, many were invested in beauty culture and fashion. … Ford shows how these sites of resistance were just as critical in the fight for black liberation as buses and lunch counters.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, May, 2016, P.D. Hopkins, review of Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul, p. 1360.
Journal of Southern History, November, 2016, Katie Knowles, review of Liberated Threads, p. 979.
Library Journal, October 15, 2015, Cicely Douglas, review of Liberated Threads, p. 105.
ONLINE
Diverse Online, http://diverseeducation.com/ (July 6, 2014), Cassandra West, “Fierce Feminist Tanisha Ford Brings Style to Her Scholarship.”
Essays in History, http://www.essaysinhistory.com/ (August 3, 2017), review of Liberated Threads.
Tanisha C. Ford Home Page, http://www.tanishacford.com (August 3, 2017).
University of Delaware Web site, http://www.history.udel.edu/ (August 3, 2017), author faculty profile.*
Fierce Feminist Tanisha Ford Brings Style to Her Scholarship
July 6, 2014 | :
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by Cassandra West
Tanisha Ford’s scholarship offers the first study of its kind to trace the transnational evolution of what she terms “soul style” — an African-inspired mode of dress and hairstyling — as it emerged in the 1960s and ’70s.
Tanisha Ford’s scholarship offers the first study of its kind to trace the transnational evolution of what she terms “soul style” — an African-inspired mode of dress and hairstyling — as it emerged in the 1960s and ’70s.
Even though her work is rooted in the past, Tanisha Ford takes a thoroughly modern approach to it. Trained in 20th century U.S. and Black women’s history, the University of Massachusetts Amherst assistant professor is strictly 21st century in her approach to writing and teaching about the lives of Black women in the U.S., Britain and the African diaspora.
Ford’s scholarship offers the first study of its kind to trace the transnational evolution of what she terms “soul style” — an African-inspired mode of dress and hairstyling — as it emerged in the 1960s and ’70s.
Described by her Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies chair as an “up-and-coming star in African-American women’s history,” Ford’s personal style is far removed from that of dowdy-looking bookworm. She is feminist, fashionable and fly, as she describes herself. On a Facebook update earlier this year, Ford posted a photo of herself “rockin,” as she put it, a new makeup shade on the first day of class. “Do not be alarmed,” she told her students, “I am a young, fly, black woman … and I AM your professor!” The Facebook post included the hashtag #feministfierce.
Ford is simultaneously an academic historian who is active in public history projects and a social media whiz. She’s a contributing editor to the blog The Feminist Wire, posts widely on Facebook and Twitter, and also blogs on her own website Haute Couture Intellectualism, or her “virtual atelier,” offering views on “fashion and body politics, race, gender, and sexuality in contemporary culture.”
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Her approach to history is to mine source documents in fresh and revealing ways. She reached beyond the mainstream narrative about the civil rights movement, which, she says, is typically “about the fight to integrate lunch counters, bus stations, gaining greater access to public institutions as a way to push back against Jim Crow segregations.”
Delving into the lives of women involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other parts of the movement, she found “this whole [set of] politics around their bodies and how they chose to adorn themselves when they were participating in sit-ins, rallies and protests.”
Her research showed why it was hard for Black women to maintain “a respectable Sunday best look with the straightened hair, dresses and skirts, pearl earrings and heels.” Women in the movement were being attacked by police dogs, sprayed with water hoses and jailed, Ford explains. They weren’t able to keep up with grooming, nor could they afford to buy nice clothes and get their hair styled regularly.
“Out of this was birthed a political dress aesthetic where they started to embrace this unadorned, natural hair look and see that as part of the aesthetic politics of the movement itself,” she says.
The more she explored, the more she recognized the importance of the quotidian, the everyday experiences of people. “There is nothing more everyday than getting dressed,” Ford says. “It’s an experience we can all relate to.”
Last summer the Journal of Southern History published her article, “SNCC Women, Denim, and the Politics of Dress.” She is currently writing a book, “Liberated Threads: Black Women and the Politics of Adornment,” which uncovers how and why Black women use beauty culture and fashion as a form of resistance and cultural-political expression.
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Ford names Tiffany Gill, associate professor in the Department of Black American Studies and the Department of History at the University of Delaware, who has also written about Black women entrepreneurs and the field of beauty care, as a great influence on her work.
Gill sees Ford as an accessible and important public intellectual. “She’s opening up new spaces for conversation. It’s not just that she makes great scholarly contributions, but she is also bringing attention to the issues of adornment and style to wider audiences.”
This scholarly work may have never happened had Ford not heard a lecture by Claude Clegg, former chair of the Indiana University Department of History, when she was an undergraduate. Clegg talked about how he researched a biography by digging through FBI files and piecing together newspaper clippings. The lecture sealed the deal on Ford wanting to study history.
She remembers saying to herself, “Wow, history isn’t just memorizing dates, facts.”
After earning her master’s in Afro-American Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ford returned to IU for her doctorate, and Clegg ended up being her adviser.
Now a teacher herself and proponent of hands-on-learning, Ford says her major goal is to help students find their own voice. “I like to see my students as co-thinkers. I like to empower my students to think of themselves as thinkers and contributors, as opposed to vessels that are waiting for me to pour out knowledge into them.”
UMass Amherst’s Tanisha Ford Explores a Style Forged in Struggle and the ‘Global Politics of Soul’
October 14, 2015
Contact: Wesley Blixt 413/545-0444
Tanisha Ford
Tanisha Ford
‘Liberated Threads’
‘Liberated Threads’
AMHERST, Mass. – Tanisha Ford, assistant professor of women, gender, sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will read from her new book, “Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul” as part of a book-launch party on Monday, Oct. 19 at 5 p.m. at Amherst Books.
Ford’s book 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 – Ford shows that black women’s fashion choices became galvanizing symbols of gender and political liberation.
The opening paragraph of Ford’s introduction invokes the image of Angela Y. Davis with her iconic “halo Afro” which appeared widely in the days after the FBI placed her on its “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” list.
“A close look at the clothing as well as her hair reveals that both were significant in the construction of her radical image,” writes Ford. “In the first picture, Davis sports her Afro above a dark-colored, conservative blouse. In the second picture, taken just a few months later, her Afro is complemented by a dashiki . . . and fashionable round granny glasses.”
These “soul style” markers, writes Ford, “point to a vital yet virtually unknown story of the body politics of the civil rights-Black Power era.”
Ford’s narrative begins with singer Miriam Makeba and her 1964 album “The Voice of Africa,” and ends back in South Africa with a chapter titled “The Soul Wide World.” In between, writes Ford, “I traveled across four continents, eighteen countries and countless cities” writing the stories of “political leaders, cultural revolutionaries, feminists and socially conscious fashionistas.”
“This is not always a happy story,” she writes, “given the ways in which soul style emerged, in part, out of violence.”
Ford holds a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. in history from Indiana University. She also earned a master’s degree in Afro-American studies from the University of Wisconsin. Ford received the A. Elizabeth Taylor Prize for the best article on southern women’s history. Her article “SNCC Women: Denim and the Politics of Dress,” was published in the August 2013 issue of theJournal of Southern History.
Amherst Books is located at 8 Main St.
Tanisha C. Ford
Associate Professor, Black American Studies & History
tcford@udel.edu
302-831-6815
424 Ewing Hall
Education: Ph.D., Indiana University 2011
Research interests: Black Women’s history, fashion and body politics, gender and social movements, Black Feminist theory, youth cultures, global popular cultures
Publications
Books:
Liberated Threads Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (University of North Carolina Press, 2015)
Tanisha C. Ford is Associate Professor of Black American Studies and History at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (UNC Press, 2015), which narrates the powerful intertwining histories of the Black Freedom movement and the rise of the global fashion industry. Liberated Threads won the 2016 Organization of American Historians’ Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for best book on civil rights history.
She studies social movement history, feminist issues, material culture, popular culture and entertainment, and fashion, beauty, and body politics. Her public writing and cultural commentary has been featured in diverse media outlets and publications including the New York Times, the Root, the New Yorker, Ebony, NPR: Code Switch, Fusion, News One, New York Magazine: The Cut, Yahoo! Style, Vibe Vixen, Feministing, the Journal of Southern History, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, The Black Scholar, and New York City’s HOT 97.
A dynamic speaker, she has been invited to give lectures and serve as a roundtable discussant at institutions around the world including: the Brooklyn Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Delaware Historical Society, Parson’s The New School for Design, Ritsumeikan University (Japan), the Black Europe Summer School (Netherlands), and The University of London.
She is currently working on two new book projects. The first is a history of black style, from Black Power to #BLackLivesMatter. The second centers on the black women activist-socialites of the mid-twentieth century who hosted lavish galas, fashion shows, and pageants in cities such as New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, Paris, and Berlin to raise funds for the burgeoning Black Freedom movement.
Her research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Ford Foundation, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Center for Black Music Research, among others.
She lives in New York City.
Ford, Tanisha C.: Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul
Cicely Douglas
Library Journal. 140.17 (Oct. 15, 2015): p105.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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* Ford, Tanisha C. Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul. Univ. of North Carolina. Oct. 2015.272p. illus. notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9781469625157. $29.95; ebk. ISBN 9781469625164. SOC SCI
In this compelling examination of "soul style," Ford (Do You Remember Olive Morris?) probes the cultural history of the black Diaspora through body politics and style choices. By tracing what started as one woman's exploration into her sense of self, Ford describes soul style as having transitioned from being an individual choice to becoming a collective political statement and eventually to misdiagnosed perceptions among the media. The style politics adopted by black women in both the United States and abroad created an identity for the Diaspora that moves between being a connection through the combined vision of kinship to a symbol of pride and resistance. Black style moved from grassroots to the mainstream, giving marketing campaigns a new demographic and the media a template from which to depict young black activists. VERDICT Ford creates a fierce and vibrant dialog on the rarely recounted women's perspective on black style, beauty, and soul. Our style tells the story of us. This account is beneficial for scholars and history buffs alike.--Cicely Douglas, Palm Beach Cty. Lib. Syst., FL
Douglas, Cicely
Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul
Katie Knowles
Journal of Southern History. 82.4 (Nov. 2016): p979.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
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Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul. By Tanisha C. Ford. Gender and American Culture. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. xvi, 256. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696 2515-7.)
Tanisha C. Ford presents a creative and thoroughly researched piece of scholarship. She deftly moves across the African diaspora to historicize soul-style fashion popular from the late 1950s into the 1970s. Testimonies of individual women from South Africa, London's Brixton neighborhood, and her own mother's story of growing up black and female in Indiana form the heart of the narrative. African American soul music and the black press provide an additional layer of sources, as well as an explanation for how soul style moved around the Atlantic. Ford places black women at the center of both defining and popularizing not only soul style but also the transatlantic civil rights struggles of the mid-twentieth century.
Readers of this journal will be most interested in chapter 3 about soul style in the 1960s U.S. South. By the time readers arrive in the South, Ford has already taken them through the early roots of soul style in the Greenwich Village and Harlem neighborhoods of New York City. These two earlier chapters focus on the connections between fashion and music in defining a soul style that combined African American ideas of authentic African dress, textiles, and hairstyles that were not always accurate. Women members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) expressed a different kind of soul style that arose from working in the rural South. SNCC women adopted the clothing of the rural working class as a practical response to their inability to perform civil rights work while dealing with constant hair upkeep and care of expensive fabrics. This fashion also became a response to the respectability politics espoused by other civil rights organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and by the black press.
The book reaches the height of the soul-style movement in the fourth chapter, which is also the strongest. It is here that Ford's mother, Amye Glover, becomes the focus of the narrative. Glover grew up attending a predominantly black high school in Indiana but then went to the predominantly white Indiana University. She was an early adopter of soul style in her teenage years, and it became an even larger part of her identity in college. Glover's story and personal photos are combined with Ford's analysis of popular magazines like Essence, the mass production of soul style, and an excellent breakdown of the Afro hairstyle.
Ford's international focus allows her to place African American ideas about Africanness within a global framework, particularly in the last chapter describing soul style in anti-apartheid South Africa. Her approach to historicizing a fashion moment within a political movement is a significant contribution to a growing body of literature that recognizes the importance of everyday experiences. In the epilogue, Ford explains her own connections to soul style and the importance of doing this research to better understand herself. The moving testimonies Ford presents of the black women who lived through soul style's heyday are proof that activist scholarship motivated by personal experience provides powerful contributions to the field of history.
KATIE KNOWLES
Alexandria, Virginia
Knowles, Katie
Ford, Tanisha C.: Liberated threads: black women, style, and the global politics of soul
P.D. Hopkins
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.9 (May 2016): p1360.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Ford, Tanisha C. Liberated threads: black women, style, and the global politics of soul. North Carolina, 2015. 256p bibl index afp ISBN 9781469625157 cloth, $29.95; ISBN 9781469625164 ebook, $28.99
In six chapters, Ford (women, gender, and sexuality studies, Massachusetts) adds important elements to the conversation on resistance by first showing that not only was black beautiful, it was also marketable from fashion's runway to the covers of magazines and record albums. Secondly, she explores this lucrative soul style as also practical, from sit-in counters to marches and jails. According to Ford, black women could not continue to have their blouses torn and dresses and stockings shredded as they were dragged along the ground in front of countless television cameras. No more pill-button hats, white gloves, and hair--fried, dried and blown to the side--that would revert back to biblical days when doused with foodstuff, drinks, water hoses, or even spit. Black women were at war and needed to dress the part. Thus, Ford purports that these cross-racial and cross-ethnic political alliances, as well as cultural chaffing, gave birth to soul style. Most importantly, while most blacks were not involved in formal political organizing, many were invested in beauty culture and fashion. Consequently, Ford shows how these sites of resistance were just as critical in the fight for black liberation as buses and lunch counters. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.--P. D. Hopkins, Christopher Newport University
Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul
Reviewed Work(s)
Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul. By Tanisha C. Ford. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Pp. 272. Cloth, $29.95.
Tanisha C. Ford’s Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul skillfully traces the multiple ways that black women have used their hair and clothing as tools of resistance. Through a transnational history of “soul style,” which comprises African and African American-inspired hairstyles and dress, Ford interrogates how black women in the U.S., England, and Africa have challenged gender norms and inequality while developing their own sense of style and identity. In addition, Ford demonstrates the importance of soul style to the black community before it was co-opted by mainstream fashion industries. Using an “eclectic archive,” including oral interviews, FBI files, rare photographs, international fashion and beauty magazines, album covers, Ford thoroughly bridges the fields of fashion studies and civil rights movement history, illustratively demonstrating how women deliberately incorporated beauty and fashion into their activism.
Ford dedicates the first three chapters to the unique development of soul style in the U.S. She begins by examining the early years of this fashion movement through African singer and performer Miriam Makeba. Though she was rebranded for a diverse U.S. audience to fit the norms of African American respectability, Makeba kept her short coiffed hair natural, refusing to process it. Ford explains, “As Makeba became a megastar in the United States, her hairstyle began to represent a liberated African beauty aesthetic for African Americans” (16). Indeed, Makeba’s African roots represented the origins of soul style itself to black Americans. Ford also asserts that Makeba’s friendship with singers Abbey Lincoln, Odetta, and Nina Simone marked the beginnings of soul style. Through their political singing and non-normative clothing and hairstyles, these activists brought women’s issues to the forefront of the black liberation movement.
Ford highlights the myriad ways that soul style evolved in different regions of the nation. For example, Ford discusses how soul style flourished in Harlem due to the efforts of the Grandassa modeling troupe. African Jazz-Art Society (AJAS) founders, Ronnie and Cecil Brathwaite, focused on style and adornment politics with the formation of the troupe. In an effort to convince everyday black women that soul style was cool and worth emulating, AJAS sponsored fashion shows where each of the model’s hair and fashion represented a different African urban city. Ford argues that Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) female members changed the image of soul style based on practicality and organizing needs. The SNCC soul sisters in the U.S. South refused to conform to standards of respectability that required them to wear modest clothing, heeled pumps, and neatly pressed hair because of the gendered violence they received while protesting. In direct contrast to the Sunday’s finest uniforms worn by Southern Christian Leadership Conference members, “the new SNCC skin” allowed women to wear denim, more casual shirtwaist dresses, and short natural hairstyles that made protesting easier and working with the local community less divisive.
In her final chapter on the development of soul culture in the U.S., Ford challenges the dominant narrative that contends that soul style went straight from grassroots to the mainstream. She claims that black female college students used their version of soul style to fight racism on campus and one-dimensional images of black womanhood before corporate co-optation occurred. For example, as images of Angela Davis were widely circulated, calling for her arrest, her Afro became a symbol of black consciousness, and black women on campuses across the nation began sporting the hairdo. Ford asserts that by the end of the 1970s, co-optation of soul style by major fashion industries had taken hold. Though many criticized the mainstream’s incorporation of soul style, denim, Afro wigs, and clothing with African prints continued to be mass produced.
The last two chapters of Liberated Threads focus on international models of soul style. Looking at London, Ford explores how Afro-Caribbean youth formed the Black Panther Movement (BPM) and used it to foster cultural and political growth in Brixton. Her discussion of one BPM member, Olive Morris, is particularly important. Ford maintains that Morris personalized soul style in a way that “queered” gender lines by dressing against gendered norms, making it possible for her to be misread by the police. On one occasion, Morris was brutally beaten and arrested. Police deliberately housed her alone, “punishing her for her queer gender performance, and setting her up to receive more physical punishment” (149). Morris was not only forced to strip to prove she was a woman, but was also continuously beaten. By situating Morris in the context of soul style and Brixton, in particular, Ford reveals a connection between soul and the creation of a postcolonial black identity.
Ford comes full circle when she examines how soul style has returned to Africa in the final chapter. Termed “Afro look”, soul style had a dual meaning in South Africa. Women who wore Afro hairdos, hot pants, mini skirts, and dresses with bold prints could either be activists trying to define black as beautiful or women aiming for modernity with imported styles from America and Britain. Either way, Ford argues, Afro look in Africa represented a way to transgress apartheid restrictions. Consuming Afro look, therefore, became a politicized action, whether or not it was intended as such. When the apartheid system was finally dismantled in 1994, the South African fashion industry blended memory with clothing, exemplifying a history that is being actively lived and remembered.
Tanisha C. Ford’s extensively researched Liberated Threads sheds light on a scarcely explored aspect of black female resistance, thereby adding to the growing research on race, gender, and body politics. Indeed, Ford details how black women in America, England, and Africa used seemingly quotidian practices, such as hairstyles and fashion choices, as tools for gender and political liberation. Those seeking to expand on this thought-provoking addition to black women’s history should look at the growing involvement of the U.S. government in the African fashion market and the implications of western aid on the burgeoning industry.
Alyssa Lopez
Michigan State University