Creating African Fashion Histories: Politics, Museums, and Sartorial Practices

Creating African Fashion Histories examines the disjuncture between African self-fashioning and museum practices, proposing new approaches for constructing African fashion histories and decolonizing museums, fashion studies, and global cultural history. It brings together interdisciplinary scholars and curators to explore sources and approaches for capturing the diversity of African sartorial pasts and decolonizing Eurocentric frames of thinking.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 360 pages
Publication date: 05 April 2022
Publisher: Indiana University Press

Creating African Fashion Histories examines the significant gap between African self-fashioning and museum practices, which have traditionally categorized African clothing, textiles, and body adornments as trade goods, art, and ethnographic materials rather than fashion. By contrasting the dynamism of African fashion with museums' historical holdings, this volume offers a unique perspective on how coloniality persists in knowledge and institutions today. The editors bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars and curators to discuss sources and approaches for constructing African fashion histories and explore their potential for decolonizing museums, fashion studies, and global cultural history. The volume raises important questions such as how researchers can use museum collections to uncover traces of past self-fashioning obscured by racialized forms of knowledge and institutional practice, how archival, visual, oral, ethnographic, and online sources can be employed to capture the diversity of African sartorial pasts, and how scholars and curators can decolonize the Eurocentric frames of thinking embedded in historic collections and current curricula. The voices in this ground-breaking collection, ranging from Moroccan fashion bloggers to upmarket Lagos designers, reveal fascinating histories and geographies of circulation within and beyond the continent and its diasporic communities.

Weight: 756g
Dimension: 153 x 230 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780253060129