The Wig: A Hairbrained History

In his “Otherworldly Prologue,” the Mexican essayist, poet, and writer Luigi Amara tells us that his collection of short essays, The Wig: A Hairbrained History, might well be considered “nothing more than a rather bulky footnote” (10) to this century-old, twelveword sentence crafted by the Mexican economist, professional journalist, and Baudelaire-inspired weird fiction author Carlos Diaz Dufoo Jr. Amara refers to Dufoo’s epigram as an “authentic oneline novel” (10), and by the end of his book, the idea of it being a footnote seems fully viable. Readers, general and specialized, will delight in many of the thirty-two short essays with illustrations contained in this collection. Amara wanders through the world of the wig from the past, to the present, to the past, to the future, and to the galaxy, sometimes within the very same lyrically pleasing paragraph. The book bears no relation to other popular culture texts that seek to offer a micro-global history of an object, such as Tom Standage’s A History of the World in Six Glasses. Nor is it comparable to scholarly works that detail largescale global social processes through the lens of a single fabric or a Walmart Tshirt, such as Giorgio Riello’s Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World or Pietra Rivoli’s The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy. More than anything, Amara offers a series of dazzling opportunities to discover his creative intellectual process. Given his command of his subject and hefty range of analytical tools to think reflexively across the historical landscape of western civilization, this collection implies a journey