Patterns in Circulation
Cloth, Gender, and Materiality in West Africa
Patterns in Circulation
Cloth, Gender, and Materiality in West Africa
Sylvanus brings wax cloth’s unique and complex history to light: born as a nineteenth-century Dutch colonial effort to copy Javanese batik cloth for Southeast Asian markets, it was reborn as a status marker that has dominated the visual economy of West African markets. Although most wax cloth is produced in China today, it continues to be central to the expression of West African women’s identity and power. As Sylvanus shows, wax cloth expresses more than this global motion of goods, capital, aesthetics, and labor—it is a form of archive where intimate and national memories are stored, always ready to be reanimated by human touch. By uncovering this crucial aspect of West African material culture, she enriches our understanding of global trade, the mutual negotiations that drive it, and the how these create different forms of agency and subjectivity.
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224 pages | 10 color plates, 18 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2016
Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology
Art: Middle Eastern, African, and Asian Art
History: African History
Reviews
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Patterns in Circulation
1 Fashioning the Body: Dressing the Public Self
2 Archival Prints: Alternate Histories of Taste and Circulation
3 Branding Cloth, Branding Nation: The Nana Benz and the Materiality of Power
4 Flexible Patterns: The Nanettes Remake the Market and Cloth in China
5 Dangerous Copies: Old Value Systems in a New Economy
Conclusion: Assigamé Burning
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Awards
African Studies Association UK: Fage & Oliver Prize
Shortlist
Pernal Family: Pernal Prize in African History
Shortlist
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