In this holistic approach to the study of textiles and their makers, Colleen Kriger charts the role cotton has played in commercial, community, and labor settings in West Africa. By paying close attention to the details of how people made, exchanged, and wore cotton cloth from before industrialization in Europe to the twentieth century, she is able to demonstrate some of the cultural effects of Africa's long involvement in trading contacts with Muslim societies and with Europe. Cloth in West African History thus offers a fresh perspective on the history of the region and on the local, regional, and global processes that shaped it. A variety of readers will find its account and insights into the African past and culture valuable, and will appreciate the connections made between the local concerns of small-scale weavers in African villages, the emergence of an indigenous textile industry, and its integration into international networks.

This book addresses the growing demand for applied experiences that move students beyond learning into the realm of doing by supporting the development of skills and competencies that align with emerging areas of innovation and work. It considers the urgent need to promote and invest in skills that support sustainable development, such as those needed to analyze and mitigate climate change. The authors argue that this challenge provides an opportunity to reimagine the use of Experiential Learning, connecting students with community-based partners doing the work of sustainable development around the world. Featuring compelling case studies of project partners in Nigeria, Uganda, and Tanzania working to address the complexities of climate change, they offer a practical model for implementing Experiential Learning that can be translated and scaled across sectors and resource environments. It is aimed at scholars and educators working across higher education and international education with interests in digital and experiential education.

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.

Until this century, Northern Nigeria was a major center of textile production and trade. Textile Ascendancies: Aesthetics, Production, and Trade in Northern Nigeria examines this dramatic change in textile aesthetics, technologies, and social values in order to explain the extraordinary shift in textile demand, production, and trade. Textile Ascendancies provides information for the study of the demise of textile manufacturing outside Nigeria. The book also suggests the conundrum considered by George Orwell concerning the benefits and disadvantages of “mechanical progress,” and digital progress, for human existence. While textile mill workers in northern Nigeria were proud to participate in the mechanization of weaving, the “tendency for the mechanization of the world” represented by more efficient looms and printing equipment in China has contributed to the closing of Nigerian mills and unemployment. Textile Ascendancies will appeal toanthropologists for its analyses of social identity as well as how the ethnic identity of consumers influences continued handwoven textile production. The consideration of aesthetics and fashionable dress will appeal to specialists in textiles and clothing. It will be useful to economic historians for the comparative analysis of textile manufacturing decline in the 21st century. It will also be of interest to those thinking about global futures, about digitalization, and how new ways of making cloth and clothing may provide both employment and environmentally sound production practices.

The time span covered by The Routledge History of Fashion and Dress starts in the nineteenth century, with the aftermath of the consumers’ revolution, and reaches all the way to the present. The fashion and garment industries have been international from the beginning and, as such, this volume looks at the history of fashion and dress through the lenses of both international and global history. Because fashion is also a multifaceted subject with humanagency at its core, at the confluence of thematerial (fabrics, clothing, dyes, tools, and machines) and the immaterial (savoir-faire, identities, images, and brands), this volume adopts a transdisciplinary perspective, opening its pages to researchers from a variety of complementary fields. The chapters in this volume are organized based on their relationship to five fields of study: economics and commerce, politics, business, identities, and historical sources. Paying particular attention to change, the book goes beyond the great fashion capitals and well-known fashion centers and points to the broader geographies of fashion. Particular geographical areas focus on the emergence of new fashion systems and business models, whether they be in Sweden, Bangladesh, or Spain, or on the African continent, considered to be the “new frontier” of the industry. Covering myriad aspects of the subject this is the perfect companion for all those interested in history of dress and fashion in the modern world.

Education and the arts offer multiple, mutually clarifying lenses through which to examine and understand issues of poverty and empowerment. Here, both are combined in a fascinating look at how these two often overlooked elements promote social equality and cultivate personal agency across Africa's diverse political-economic landscapes.