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

Creating African Fashion HistoriesPolitics, Museums, and Sartorial PracticesCreating African Fashion Histories examines the stark disjuncture between African self-fashioning and museum practices. Conventionally, African clothing, textiles, and body adornments were classified by museums as examples of trade goods, art, and ethnographic materials—never as “fashion.” Counterposing the dynamism of African fashion with museums’ historic holdings thus provides a unique way of confronting ways in which coloniality persists in knowledge and institutions today. This volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars and curators to debate sources and approaches for constructing African fashion histories and to examine their potential for decolonizing museums, fashion studies, and global cultural history.The editors of this volume seek to answer questions such as: How can researchers use museum collections to reveal traces of past self-fashioning that are obscured by racialized forms of knowledge and institutional practice? How can archival, visual, oral, ethnographic, and online sources be deployed to capture the diversity of African sartorial pasts? How can scholars and curators decolonize the Eurocentric frames of thinking encapsulated in historic collections and current curricula? Can new collections of African fashion decolonize museum practice?From Moroccan fashion bloggers to upmarket Lagos designers, the voices in this ground-breaking collection reveal fascinating histories and geographies of circulation within and beyond the continent and its diasporic communities.Additional ISBNs9780253060143, 9780253060112Creating African Fashion Histories: Politics, Museums, and Sartorial Practices is written by JoAnn McGregor, Heather Akou, and Nicola Stylianou and published by Indiana University Press. ISBNs for Creating African Fashion Histories are 9780253060136, 0253060133 and the print ISBNs are 9780253060129, 0253060125. Additional ISBNs include 9780253060143, 9780253060112.