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Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress (African Expressive Cultures) PDF

256 Pages·2004·4.75 MB·English
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Fashioning Africa African Expressive Cultures Patrick McNaughton, general editor Associate editors Catherine M. Cole Barbara G. Hoffman Eileen Julien Kassim Koné D. A. Masolo Elisha P. Renne Z. S. Strother EDITED BY JEAN ALLMAN Fashioning Africa Power and the Politics of Dress INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail [email protected] © 2004 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, includ- ing photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Informa- tion Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fashioning Africa : power and the politics of dress / edited by Jean Allman. p. cm. — (African expressive cultures) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-253-34415-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-253-21689-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Clothing and dress—Symbolic aspects—Africa. 2. Clothing and dress—Political aspects—Africa. 3. Women’s clothing—Africa. I. Allman, Jean Marie. II. Series. GT1580.F37 2004 391′.0096—dc22 2004000694 1 2 3 4 5 09 08 07 06 05 04 Contents Acknowledgments vii Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress 1 Jean Allman part one: fashioning unity: women and dress; power and citizenship 1. Remaking Fashion in the Paris of the Indian Ocean: Dress, Performance, and the Cultural Construction of a Cosmopolitan Zanzibari Identity 13 Laura Fair 2. Dress and Politics in Post–World War II Abeokuta (Western Nigeria) 31 Judith By¤eld 3. Nationalism without a Nation: Understanding the Dress of Somali Women in Minnesota 50 Heather Marie Akou part two: dressing modern: gender, generation, and invented (national) traditions 4. Changes in Clothing and Struggles over Identity in Colonial Western Kenya 67 Margaret Jean Hay 5. Putting on a Pano and Dancing Like Our Grandparents: Nation and Dress in Late Colonial Luanda 84 Marissa Moorman 6. “Anti-mini Militants Meet Modern Misses”: Urban Style, Gender, and the Politics of “National Culture” in 1960s Dar es Salaam, Tanzania 104 Andrew M. Ivaska part three: disciplined dress: gendered authority and national politics 7. From Khaki to Agbada: Dress and Political Transition in Nigeria 125 Elisha P. Renne 8. “Let Your Fashion Be in Line with Our Ghanaian Costume”: Nation, Gender, and the Politics of Cloth-ing in Nkrumah’s Ghana 144 Jean Allman 9. Dressing Dangerously: Miniskirts, Gender Relations, and Sexuality in Zambia 166 Karen Tranberg Hansen part four: african “traditions” and global markets: the political economy of fashion and identity 10. Fashionable Traditions: The Globalization of an African Textile 189 Victoria L. Rovine 11. African Textiles and the Politics of Diasporic Identity-Making 212 Boatema Boateng Afterword 227 Phyllis M. Martin List of Contributors 231 Index 235 vi Contents Acknowledgments From the very beginning, this project has been an extraordinary collective effort. It started as a rather vague idea early in 2001, as I puzzled over the intersections of culture, fashion, and politics in Ghana. It then came together in a wonderful set of papers presented on two panels at the 2001 meeting of the African Studies Asso- ciation in Houston, Texas. I owe my most profound gratitude, therefore, to the con- tributors to this volume—a most extraordinary group of interdisciplinary scholars who generously shared their expertise with me and with each other, and whose meticulous work and respect for deadlines kept this project on time and on target from the very beginning. Together, we owe much to the support, dedication, and enthusiasm of Dee Mortensen at Indiana University Press, and to the diligence and care of Jane Lyle and Shoshanna Green. What a pleasure it has been working with all of them. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Uni- versity of Illinois Research Board and the Mellon Faculty Fellows Program, which has afforded me the time and the resources to complete the collection before you. Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress Jean Allman In July 1953, a short piece in the Accra Evening News entitled “Hats Off to Nkru- mah” remarked on the rather sudden disappearance of men’s headwear from the capital city: In the Gold Coast today, hats have become a rarity. The youngmen walk through the sun, bareheaded, wearing their hair the Nkrumah way, and ladies have taken to the turban and the headkerchief. For years Gold Coast citizens spent vast sums on hats & became so used to them that going about in the sun without a hat on became unbearable. Meanwhile, the men who introduced this in¤rmity were gradually discarding their hats. Eventually, they were to have become acclimatised to the tropics, while the African became a weakling in his own home. Then came Nkrumah on the scene. He opened the eyes of his people to the danger and off went the hats. . . . But this is just one of the positive affects of Nkrumahism. Hats off to Nkrumah. He is a dynamic leader.1 To some, the Evening News report may seem a rather frivolous human interest story set during the most tumultuous years of Ghana’s struggle for independence from British colonial rule—a marginal slice of life tangential to the central stories of mass nationalist politics and the devolution of political power. For the contributors to this volume, however, the case of the disappearing hats is no fanciful aside. It is very much the central story—a story that is, at once, an assertion of citizenship, a call for nationalist unity against colonial domination, and a condemnation of the anglophilia of some urban elites. Fashioning Africa is concerned with the ways in which power is represented, constituted, articulated, and contested through dress. It seeks to understand bodily praxis as political praxis, fashion as political language. Each chapter explores dress practice as it is embedded in ¤elds of power—economic, political, gendered, or generational—in order to probe the ways in which modi¤cations of the body through clothing have been used both to constitute and to challenge power in Af- rica and its Diaspora. Together, the chapters foreground the power of dress, the power of fashion as an incisive political language capable of unifying, differenti- ating, challenging, contesting, and dominating. As Joanne Entwistle has remarked,

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Everywhere in the world there is a close connection between the clothes we wear and our political expression. To date, few scholars have explored what clothing means in 20th-century Africa and the diaspora. In Fashioning Africa, an international group of anthropologists, historians, and art historia
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