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11 African Textiles and the Politics of Diasporic Identity-Making Boatema Boateng Africans in the Diaspora have sought—in symbolic and material ways—to maintain their ties to their continent of origin ever since their forcible transportation to the Americas. Thus Diasporic Africans in different parts of the New World have sought to preserve their religions, languages, and clothing. More direct physical links have included various back-to-Africa migration movements since the United States’ declaration of independence from Britain in the late eighteenth century, as well as political and economic collaboration between Africans and African Americans in the African nationalist struggles of the ¤rst half of the twentieth century, Black nationalist struggles in the United States in the 1960s, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, and the economic summits instituted in the 1990s. This chapter examines the symbolic links established through the use of textiles by Diasporic Africans to create an African identity. Those links are not only part of the historical context outlined above, but are also mediated and affected by globalization in its current form of accelerated capitalist expansion. Against this background , this chapter examines the relationship between African Americans and Ghanaians in the production and use of cloth as part of a process that began with the African Diaspora and also as one instance of the cultural ®ows that are bound up with globalization. This subject is one facet of an extremely large and complex issue—the issue of the appropriation and economic exploitation of the cultural production of indigenous peoples and of communities located mostly in the global South. African textiles represent one form of such cultural production that is increasingly being exploited in this way. This trend was a key factor in Ghana’s inclusion of folklore in the country’s revised copyright laws of 1985 and 2000. As de¤ned by these laws, folklore is not limited to oral narratives and music but extends to items of material culture, including textiles. Indeed, the revision to the law has been partly attributed to the fact that imitations of local handmade adinkra and kente textiles were being mass-produced by East Asian textile factories without the payment of royalties to Ghana for the use of cloth designs that the country considered to be part of its culture (Public Agenda, 1996).1 Despite the existence of these laws and a growing movement calling for the in- ternational protection of indigenous knowledge, the mass production of textiles imitating those from different parts of the African continent has continued. While acknowledging the fact that these textiles are appropriated and exploited in both the Ghanaian and United States markets, this chapter focuses on the United States market because of its importance as an incentive for the imitation of these textiles, and because of the issues it raises about relationships between Africans in different parts of the Diaspora. In light of the historical links between continental and Diasporic Africans outlined above, it would be inaccurate to characterize African American use of pirated African textiles as the exploitation of a subordinate group by a dominant one. Instead , this chapter takes the stance elaborated by scholars like Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd,2 who seek to re¤ne the traditional Marxist analysis of global power in terms of center and periphery, arguing that the margins of global capital are not limited to speci¤c geographic locations, such as Africa and Asia. Those margins are also found in the supposed centers of power. Thus much of the history of African Americans has been a history of oppositional struggle within the United States, from margins de¤ned by a combination of race, class, and gender inequality. African Americans are therefore considered, in this essay, to occupy positions in the global economy that are analogous to those occupied by Africans. While there are clear exceptions in both groups, this is the situation of the majority. From such a perspective, Diasporic and continental Africans occupy similar locations in the global economy and their historical relationship with each other, as well as their production and consumption of culture, is mediated by that economy. The chapter argues, therefore, for a resumption of political and economic collaboration between continental and Diasporic Africans around the production and use of culture—a collaboration that leads,in the case under discussion here,to consumer consciousness and activism within the African American market for African textiles. Currently, that consciousness is limited to a relatively small group of...

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