Cosmopolitanism and Women’s Fashion in Ghana
Cosmopolitanism and Women’s Fashion in Ghana

Author: Christopher L. Richards

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-29

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1000478556

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Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, this book delves into the rich world of Ghanaian fashion, demonstrating how, over time, local dress styles and materials have been fused with global trends to create innovative, high fashion garments that reflect a distinctly Ghanaian cosmopolitanism. Ghana has a complex and diverse fashion culture which was in evidence before independence in 1957 and has continued to grow in reputation in the postcolonial period. In this book, Christopher Richards reflects on the contributions of the country’s female fashion designers, who have employed fashion to innovate existing, culturally relevant dress styles, challenge gendered forms of dress, and make bold statements regarding women’s sexuality. Treated as artworks, the book examines specific garments to illustrate the inherent complexity of their design and how fashion is often embedded with a blending of personal histories, cultural practices and global inspirations. Reflecting in particular on the works of Laura Quartey, Letitia Obeng, Juliana Kweifio-Okai, Beatrice Arthur and Aisha Ayensu, this book makes an important and timely contribution to art history, fashion studies, anthropology, history, women’s studies and African Studies. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Performing Statecraft
Performing Statecraft

Author: James R. Ball

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-10-20

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1350285188

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The crafts of governance and diplomacy are spectacular, theatrical, and performative. Performing Statecraft investigates the performances of states, their leaders, and their citizens on an expanded field of the global arts of statecraft to consider the role of performance in the domestic and international affairs of states, and the interventions into global politics by artists, scholars, and activists. Treating theatre as both an art form and a practice of political actors, this book draws together scholarship on the embodied dimensions of governance, the stagecraft of revolution, arts activism on the world stage, sports performance by heads of state, the performativity of national dress, speechmaking and colonialism, war and medicine, singing diplomats, indigenous sovereignties, and performed nationalisms. It brings the perspective and methods of performance studies to bear on global politics, offering exciting new insights into encounters between states, sovereigns, and people. Whether one is watching a campaign speech, a nightly news broadcast, a sacred dance, or a play about global conflict, these chapters make clear the importance of performance as a tool wielded by amateurs and professionals to articulate the nation in global spaces.

Dress Cultures in Zambia
Dress Cultures in Zambia

Author: Karen Tranberg Hansen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-04-27

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1009350366

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Explores both Zambian dress practices from the late-colonial period until the present and African contributions to globally circulating fashions.

Africans on the Move
Africans on the Move

Author: Fassil Demissie

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-17

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1317539540

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The 20th century witnessed the large-scale displacement and dispersal of populations across the world because of major political upheavals, among them the two European wars, decolonization and the Cold War. These major events were followed by globalization which accelerated free trade and the mobility of capital, new technologies of communication, and the movement of people, commodities, ideas, and cultures across the world. This book explores the complexity of African migration and diaspora, the discourse of ‘diaspora engagement’ and new models of citizenship and transnationalism in the context of these issues. This book was originally published as a special issue of African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal.

Conspicuous Consumption in Africa
Conspicuous Consumption in Africa

Author: Ilana van Wyk

Publisher: Wits University Press

Published: 2019-05-01

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1776143647

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A collection of essays examining cultures of consumption on the African continent From early department stores in Cape Town to gendered histories of sartorial success in urban Togo, contestations over expense accounts at an apartheid state enterprise, elite wealth and political corruption in Angola and Zambia, the role of popular religion in the political intransigence of Jacob Zuma, funerals of big men in Cameroon, youth cultures of consumption in Niger and South Africa, queer consumption in Cape Town, middle-class food consumption in Durban and the consumption of luxury handcrafted beads, this collection of essays explores the ways in which conspicuous consumption is foregrounded in various African contexts and historical moments. The essays in Conspicuous Consumption in Africa put Thorstein Veblen’s concept under robust critical scrutiny, delving into the pleasures, stresses and challenges of consuming in its religious, generational, gendered and racialised aspects, revealing conspicuous consumption as a layered set of practices, textures and relations. This volume shows how central and revealing conspicuous consumption can be to fathoming the history of Africa’s projects of modernity, and their global lineages and legacies. In its grounded, up-close case studies, it is likely to feed into current public debates on the nature and future of African societies – South African society in particular.

Africa [3 volumes]
Africa [3 volumes]

Author: Toyin Falola

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2015-12-14

Total Pages: 1415

ISBN-13: 1598846663

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These volumes offer a one-stop resource for researching the lives, customs, and cultures of Africa's nations and peoples. Unparalleled in its coverage of contemporary customs in all of Africa, this multivolume set is perfect for both high school and public library shelves. The three-volume encyclopedia will provide readers with an overview of contemporary customs and life in North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa through discussions of key concepts and topics that touch everyday life among the nations' peoples. While this encyclopedia places emphasis on the customs and cultural practices of each state, history, politics, and economics are also addressed. Because entries average 14,000 to 15,000 words each, contributors are able to expound more extensively on each country than in similar encyclopedic works with shorter entries. As a result, readers will gain a more complete understanding of what life is like in Africa's 54 nations and territories, and will be better able to draw cross-cultural comparisons based on their reading.

Green Consumption
Green Consumption

Author: Bart Barendregt

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-15

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1000189627

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Green lifestyles and ethical consumption have become increasingly popular strategies in moving towards environmentally-friendly societies and combating global poverty. Where previously environmentalists saw excess consumption as central to the problem, green consumerism now places consumption at the heart of the solution. However, ethical and sustainable consumption are also important forms of central to the creation and maintenance of class distinction. Green Consumption scrutinizes the emergent phenomenon of what this book terms eco-chic: a combination of lifestyle politics, environmentalism, spirituality, beauty and health. Eco-chic connects ethical, sustainable and elite consumption. It is increasingly part of the identity kit of certain sections of society, who seek to combine taste and style with care for personal wellness and the environment. This book deals with eco-chic as a set of activities, an ideological framework and a popular marketing strategy, offering a critical examination of its manifestations in both the global North and South. The diverse case studies presented in this book range from Basque sheep cheese production and Ghanaian Afro-chic hairstyles to Asian tropical spa culture and Dutch fair-trade jewellery initiatives. The authors assess the ways in which eco-chic, with its apparent paradox of consumption and idealism, can make a genuine contribution to solving some of the most pressing problems of our time.

Creating African Fashion Histories
Creating African Fashion Histories

Author: JoAnn McGregor

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2022-04-05

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 0253060133

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Creating 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.

Fashion, Agency, and Empowerment
Fashion, Agency, and Empowerment

Author: Annette Lynch

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-11-29

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1350058270

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Fashion has always been strongly linked with the politics of gender and equality. In this global and interdisciplinary collection, leading authors explore the relationships between the dressed body, fashion, sex, and power, with an emphasis on the role of dress in both reinforcing and challenging social norms. Covering a range of geographic and social contexts, the book explores the role of fashion in empowering both individuals and groups to create transformation and change. Taking us from the performance of black dandyism through stylized hats, to the use of challenging dance forms and male-inspired dress by female South African dancers to express independence and equality, to ways in which recent Bond Girls have challenged traditional gender binaries, the book provides a crucial entry point into discussions of fashion as an empowerment strategy. Fashion, Agency, and Empowerment encourages the reader to critically examine the cultural and social impact of sexual objectification, as well as to consider personal and shared narratives of self-objectification and repression. With chapters ranging from the iconic self-fashioning of Princess Diana to a discussion of sex, power, and cultural constructions of masculinity, Fashion, Agency, and Empowerment provides crucial insights into global fashion, political structures, and social life.