African Dress

African Dress
Title African Dress PDF eBook
Author Karen Tranberg Hansen
Publisher A&C Black
Pages 273
Release 2013-08-29
Genre Design
ISBN 0857858203

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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.

Aso Ebi

Aso Ebi
Title Aso Ebi PDF eBook
Author Okechukwu Charles Nwafor
Publisher University of Michigan Press
Pages 253
Release 2021-05-24
Genre Social Science
ISBN 0472128663

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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.

Dress in the Making of African Identity: A Social and Cultural History of the Yoruba People

Dress in the Making of African Identity: A Social and Cultural History of the Yoruba People
Title Dress in the Making of African Identity: A Social and Cultural History of the Yoruba People PDF eBook
Author Bukola Adeyemi Oyeniyi
Publisher Cambria Press
Pages 304
Release 2015-09-08
Genre Social Science
ISBN 1621967190

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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.

African Costumes and Textiles

African Costumes and Textiles
Title African Costumes and Textiles PDF eBook
Author Anne-Marie Bouttiaux
Publisher 5Continents
Pages 328
Release 2008-09
Genre Art
ISBN

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Celebrating African costumes and textiles, this volume draws on historical and modern pieces from the Zaira and Marcel Mis Collection. The extraordinary works presented exemplify the craftsmanship of highly skilled African weavers and provide insight into the lives and culture of various ethnic groups. Whether the materials used are wool, cotton, silk, raffia, or bark, the patterns the weavers produce are predominantly geometric and abstract, but highly stylized figurative motifs are also found. The designs frequently illustrate excerpts from historical or mythical stories. The book presents a breathtaking variety of costumes, textiles, and accessories used for everyday wear and for special celebrations, and explores the different techniques, influences, and meanings behind these colorful works of art. The essays describe the history of the development of these techniques and the richness of the symbolism in this form of cultural heritage. The superb photography showcases the splendor of these intricate and exquisite textiles.

African American Dress and Adornment

African American Dress and Adornment
Title African American Dress and Adornment PDF eBook
Author Barbara Martin Starke
Publisher
Pages 232
Release 1990
Genre Design
ISBN

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The Language of Dress

The Language of Dress
Title The Language of Dress PDF eBook
Author Steeve O. Buckridge
Publisher
Pages 292
Release 2004
Genre Clothing and dress
ISBN 9789766401436

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"His work contributes to the ongoing interest in the history of women and in the history of resistance."--Jacket.

Fashioning Africa

Fashioning Africa
Title Fashioning Africa PDF eBook
Author Jean Allman
Publisher Indiana University Press
Pages 260
Release 2004-09-09
Genre Art
ISBN 9780253111043

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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 historians bring rich and diverse perspectives to this fascinating topic. From clothing as an expression of freedom in early colonial Zanzibar to Somali women's headcovering in inner-city Minneapolis, these essays explore the power of dress in African and pan-African settings. Nationalist and diasporic identities, as well as their histories and politics, are examined at the level of what is put on the body every day. Readers interested in fashion history, material and expressive cultures, understandings of nation-state styles, and expressions of a distinctive African modernity will be engaged by this interdisciplinary and broadly appealing volume. Contributors are Heather Marie Akou, Jean Allman, A. Boatema Boateng, Judith Byfield, Laura Fair, Karen Tranberg Hansen, Margaret Jean Hay, Andrew M. Ivaska, Phyllis M. Martin, Marissa Moorman, Elisha P. Renne, and Victoria L. Rovine.