Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress

Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress

Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress Jean Allman In July 1953, a short piece in the Accra Evening News entitled “Hats Off to Nkrumah ” remarked on the rather sudden disappearance of men’s headwear from the capital city: In the Gold Coast today, hats have become a rarity. The youngmen walk through the sun, bareheaded, wearing their hair the Nkrumah way, and ladies have taken to the turban and the headkerchief. For years Gold Coast citizens spent vast sums on hats & became so used to them that going about in the sun without a hat on became unbearable. Meanwhile, the men who introduced this in¤rmity were gradually discarding their hats. Eventually, they were to have become acclimatised to the tropics, while the African became a weakling in his own home. Then came Nkrumah on the scene. He opened the eyes of his people to the danger and off went the hats. . . . But this is just one of the positive affects of Nkrumahism. Hats off to Nkrumah. He is a dynamic leader.1 To some, the Evening News report may seem a rather frivolous human interest story set during the most tumultuous years of Ghana’s struggle for independence from British colonial rule—a marginal slice of life tangential to the central stories of mass nationalist politics and the devolution of political power.For the contributors to this volume, however, the case of the disappearing hats is no fanciful aside. It is very much the central story—a story that is, at once, an assertion of citizenship, a call for nationalist unity against colonial domination, and a condemnation of the anglophilia of some urban elites. Fashioning Africa is concerned with the ways in which power is represented, constituted, articulated, and contested through dress. It seeks to understand bodily praxis as political praxis, fashion as political language. Each chapter explores dress practice as it is embedded in ¤elds of power—economic, political, gendered, or generational—in order to probe the ways in which modi¤cations of the body through clothing have been used both to constitute and to challenge power in Africa and its Diaspora. Together, the chapters foreground the power of dress, the power of fashion as an incisive political language capable of unifying, differentiating , challenging, contesting, and dominating. As Joanne Entwistle has remarked, dress “operates at the interface between the individual and the social world . . . the private and the public.”2 And it is precisely because of this strategic positioning that dress functions as a salient and powerful political language—one comparable in eloquence and potency to the spoken words of the most skilled orator or the written words of the most compelling propagandist. Yet most historical literature concerned with questions of power and political praxis in Africa has not been particularly attuned to bodily praxis or sartorial language. Clothing or dress has rarely attracted more than a footnote.3 Cultural Studies, Ethnography, and the Problem of History In many ways, this lacuna is not so surprising when you consider the very different ways dress and fashion have been treated in the relevant academic literatures , with the bulk of scholarship being grounded in one or the other of two dominant paradigms: 1) a cultural studies or historical approach to fashion and 2) an anthropological or ethnographic approach to dress. The former has been speci ¤cally concerned with Western fashion as a system (including production and distribution) that has shifted across time and space, and hence is profoundly historical . It considers fashion to be an explicit manifestation of the rise of capitalism and Western modernity.4 Ethnographic studies, on the other hand, have been concerned with dress more broadly de¤ned as “an assemblage of modi¤cations of the body and/or supplements to the body.”5 Leading scholars of this approach, like Ruth Barnes and Joanne Eicher, have insisted that fashion is not a dress system speci¤c to the West and their work has consistently sought to liberate the idea of “fashion” from the theoretical clutches of Western modernity.6 They have been joined by a handful of cultural studies scholars, including Craik, who has argued that Treating fashion as a marker of civilization, with all its attendant attributes, is the reason why fashion has been excluded from the repertoires of non-western cultures. Other codes of clothing behaviour are relegated to the realm of costume which, as “pre-civilised” behaviour, is characterised in opposition to fashion, as unchanging,¤xed by social status, and group-oriented...