African Dress

Dress and fashion practices in Africa and the diaspora are dynamic and diverse, whether on the street or on the fashion runway. Focusing on the dressed body as a performance site, African Dress explores how ideas and practices of dress contest or legitimize existing power structures through expressions of individual identity and the cultural and political order. Drawing on innovative, interdisciplinary research by established and up and coming scholars, the book examines real life projects and social transformations that are deeply political, revolving around individual and public goals of dignity, respect, status, and morality. With its remarkable scope, this book will attract students and scholars of fashion and dress, material culture and consumption, performance studies, and art history in relation to Africa and on a global scale.

This is a book on the social and cultural history of Yoruba people, a people in southwest Nigeria. As the first to provide a comprehensive treatment of Yoruba dress in historical perspective, this book is an important contribution to African history in general and the Yoruba cultural history in particular. The book illuminates the impact of Christianity, Islam, and British colonialism on the construction of Yoruba identity, and how dress was entangled in that construction. It also provides insightful discussions of the transformations in dress culture since independence and demonstrates the importance of dress as a site for contesting and articulating postcolonial Yoruba identity and class structure within the Nigerian national space. This book provides many insights into these issues and is thus an invaluable addition to Africana studies, anthropology, and history.

Blackness, as a concept, is extremely fluid: it can refer to cultural and ethnic identity, socio-political status, an aesthetic and embodied way of being, a social and political consciousness, or a diasporic kinship. It is used as a description of skin color ranging from the palest cream to the richest chocolate; as a marker of enslavement, marginalization, criminality, filth, or evil; or as a symbol of pride, beauty, elegance, strength, and depth. Despite the fact that it is elusive and difficult to define, blackness serves as one of the most potent and unifying domains of identity. God and Blackness offers an ethnographic study of blackness as it is understood within a specific community—that of the First Afrikan Church, a middle-class Afrocentric congregation in Atlanta, Georgia. Drawing on nearly two years of participant observation and in‑depth interviews, Andrea C. Abrams examines how this community has employed Afrocentrism and Black theology as a means of negotiating the unreconciled natures of thoughts and ideals that are part of being both black and American. Specifically, Abrams examines the ways in which First Afrikan’s construction of community is influenced by shared understandings of blackness, and probes the means through which individuals negotiate the tensions created by competing constructions of their black identity. Although Afrocentrism operates as the focal point of this discussion, the book examines questions of political identity, religious expression and gender dynamics through the lens of a unique black church.

First published in 2006, this volume provides the first in-depth analysis of the place of visual representations within the process of decolonisation during the period 1945 to 1970. The chapters trace the way in which different visual genres – art, film, advertising, photography, news reports and ephemera – represented and contributed to the political and social struggles over Empire and decolonisation during the mid-Twentieth century. The book examines both the direct visual representation of imperial retreat after 1945 as well as the reworkings of imperial and ‘racial’ ideologies within the context of a transformed imperialism. While the book engages with the dominant archive of artists, exhibitions, newsreels and films, it also explores the private images of the family album as well as examining the visual culture of anti-colonial resistance.

The Nigerian and West African practice of aso ebi fashion invokes notions of wealth and group dynamics in social gatherings. Okechukwu Nwafor’s volume Aso ebi investigates the practice in the cosmopolitan urban setting of Lagos, and argues that the visual and consumerist hype typical of the late capitalist system feeds this unique fashion practice. The book suggests that dress, fashion, aso ebi, and photography engender a new visual culture that largely reflects the economics of mundane living. Nwafor examines the practice’s societal dilemma, whereby the solidarity of aso ebi is dismissed by many as an ephemeral transaction. A circuitous transaction among photographers, fashion magazine producers, textile merchants, tailors, and individual fashionistas reinvents aso ebi as a product of cosmopolitan urban modernity. The results are a fetishization of various forms of commodity culture, personality cults through mass followership, the negotiation of symbolic power through mass-produced images, exchange value in human relationships through gifts, and a form of exclusion achieved through digital photo editing. Aso ebi has become an essential part of Lagos cosmopolitanism: as a rising form of a unique visual culture it is central to the unprecedented spread of a unique West African fashion style that revels in excessive textile overflow. This extreme dress style is what an individual requires to transcend the lack imposed by the chaos of the postcolonial city.