GHD Blog
Amily
A young adult male sporting a Jewfro.
[edit] Jewfro
A Jewfro (portmanteau of the words Jewish and afro) or Isro
(portmanteau of the words Israel and afro) refers to a curly hairstyle
worn by certain people of Jewish descent, although it is also worn by
people of non-Jewish descent. Its name is inspired by the afro
hairstyle, which it resembles.
The term has its roots in the 1960s and 1970s when many prominent
figures were described as sporting the hairstyle. The Los Angeles
Times called college football star Scott Marcus a flower child with
“golden brown hair...in ringlets around his head in what he calls a
Jewish afro style”.[13]
The New York Times in a 1971 article on Harvard University’s “hairy”
basketball team, wrote that Captain Brian Newmark, “hasn’t had a
haircut since last May and his friends have suggested his hairdo is a
first cousin to the Afro...in the case of the Jewish Junior from
Brooklyn, though, the bushy dark hair that is piled high on his head
has been called an Isro."[14] Novelist Judith Rossner was described in
a Chicago Tribune profile as the “grown-up Wunderkind with an open,
oval face framed by a Jewish Afro."[15]
[edit] Fuzzy-wuzzy
A curly-haired Hadendoa Beja warrior with a fuzzy-wuzzy hairstyle.
The Hadendoa Beja of Northeast Africa were called Fuzzy-Wuzzies by
British colonial troops during the Mahdist War of the late 19th
century due to their often-times large and elaborate hairstyles, which
they shaped with the assistance of butter. Similarly, young males of
nomadic clans in Somalia were known to tease their hair into rather
large bushes, which they would also hold in place with butter. As they
aged and got married, they would tend to cut their hair.[1]
[edit] Southeastern Africa
Variations of the afro have been worn by one or both sexes in the many
disparate cultures of the African continent. Due to the hairstyle's
links to members of the African-American Civil Rights and Black Power
movements, the Afro was seen by several outside cultures as a
dangerous symbol of political unrest, including Tanzania where the
Afro was banned in the 1970s because it was seen as a symbol of
neocolonialism and as part of an American cultural invasion.[1][2][16]
[17] In the 1950s and 60s, South African women were also known to wear
their hair in an Afro-type style.[2]
[edit] Caribbean
The afro did not rise to the same level of popularity among the Afro-
Caribbean community as it did in the United States, in part because of
the popularity of dreadlocks, which played an important role in the
Rastafari movement.[2] Not unlike the afro's significance among the
members of the American Black Power movement, dreadlocks symbolized
black pride and empowerment amongst the Rastafari of the Caribbean.[3]
[10] The hairstyle was also banned in Cuba during the 1960s.[18]
[edit] Criticism of the hairstyle's link to Afrocentrism
Although styles similar to the Afro had existed in Africa prior to the
colonization of the Americas, some critics have suggested that the
Afro hairstyle is not particularly African.[19][3] In his book titled
Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies,
cultural critic Kobena Mercer argued that the contemporary African
society of the mid 20th century did not consider either hairstyle to
denote any particular "Africanness"; conversely, some Africans felt
that these styles signified "First-worldness".[3] Similarly, Brackette
F. Williams stated in her book Stains on My Name, War in My Veins:
Guyana and the politics of cultural struggle that African nationalists
were irritated by the Afro's adoption by African Americans as a symbol
of their African heritage; they saw this trend as an example of
Western arrogance.[20]
[edit] See also