Presents a collection of sixteen African folktales by poet, novelist, critic, and statesman, Bernard Binlin Dadie that represents the oral tradition of his native Ivory Coast.

A rhyming description of the kente cloth costumes of the Ashanti and Ewe people of Ghana and a portrayal of the symbolic colors and patterns.

The author presents a collection of 150 contemporary African American quilts and the stories behind both the quilts and the quilters.

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 is an important resource for designers, textile lovers, and African art scholars. Over 200 color photographs beautifully illustrate the mud-cloth art of the Bogolan people in Mali, Africa. Their art form, in which geometric, abstract, and semi-abstract patterns are hand painted with mud dyes on hand woven cloth, has gained enormous popularity internationally. The CD included with the book contains over 200 patterns, and is compatible with most graphic, design, and editing programs.

Volume I surveys the long history of fashion from the ancient world to c. 1800. The volume seeks to answer fundamental questions on the origins of fashion, challenging Eurocentric explanations that the emergence of fashion was a European phenomenon and shows instead that fashion found early expressions across the globe well before the age of European colonialism and imperialism. It sheds light on how fashion was experienced in a multitude of ways depending on class, gender, and race, and despite geographical distance, fashion connected populations across the globe. Fashions flowered and were reseeded, through entanglements of empire, forced and voluntary migration, evolving racial systems, burgeoning sea travel and transcontinental systems.