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K E N T E W E AV E R K WA B E NA told the following story about an attempt to produce handwoven kente in the quantities needed to supply global markets: I remember once, Mandela, they say he went to America and he wore kente, he wore a kente jumper and wore it there. So when he got there the Americans were so happy and wanted some. A certain Ghanaian came and placed an order in Ghana. He waited for a large quantity to be made. This work, too, cannot be rushed. By the time he returned [to the States], some country had taken a picture and sent it, and the Abidjan people had made about three containers full and sent it there. His enterprise failed.1 Whether South African statesman Nelson Mandela was indeed responsible for a spike in U.S. demand for kente is uncertain. But Asante’s story helps to reveal the challenges that adinkra and kente producers face in competing in the global economy. If identity-based claims over adinkra and kente are bound up with Asante, Ghanaian, and African American cultural nationalisms, the circulation of these fabrics and their designs beyond Ghana is linked with cultural and economic globalization. That circulation can be seen as an example of the cultural flows that some celebrate as bringing disparate parts of the world in closer contact with each other.2 It also links adinkra and kente producers in “local” sites like Bonwire and Ntonso with global markets, highlighting the importance of paying attention to the local in discussions of globalization.3 However, that same focus on the local shows that global cultural flows are uneven and do not equally benefit everyone . Asante cloth producers may be linked to the global economy through the tourism industry that brings part of those markets to their doorsteps and also through commissions from entrepreneurs who operate globally, but there are practical limits to their ability to participate in those markets. 145 Chapter 5 This Work Cannot Be Rushed Global Flows, Global Regulation Kwabena’s story also provides another example of the impact of massmanufacturing methods on cloth producers, especially given consumer acceptance of mass-produced imitations of handmade cloth. Where it is no longer important that adinkra and kente be hand-stenciled or handwoven in Asokwa or Bonwire, Asante, or even in the Republic of Ghana; where it no longer matters that they follow the aesthetic conventions of adinkra and kente designs, then they might as well be mass produced in India or Korea and their motifs combined with other markers of Africa, such as Malian bogolanfini designs. This is what has happened with adinkra and kente and countless other examples of indigenous cultural products ranging from textiles to music.4 Their production has shifted from local communities to sites that can optimize labor and markets. Along with the loss of revenue to the original producers, there are changes in symbolic power and cultural expression . An adinkra symbol that means “unity” in Asante becomes, simply, “Africa” in its new context. While such changes in symbolism are an inevitable aspect of any dynamic culture and important to the working out of cultural identities, they also have significant economic ramifications. In the case recounted by Kwabena, those exploiting the situation were “the Abidjan people,” namely, entrepreneurs from the Ivory Coast, which was the initial source of mass-produced imitation kente in Ghana. It is also clear from the gendered nature of appropriation, discussed in chapter 2, that female Ghanaian cloth traders are perceived by some adinkra and kente producers as complicit in the production of “Abidjan cloth.” Increasingly, however, the most effective producers of “African” cloth for global markets are not African at all but Asian. As noted in the Introduction, the November 1996 edition of the Ghanaian newspaper Public Agenda cited East Asian appropriations of kente cloth as part of the concern in protecting folklore under copyright law. If globalization brings different cultures together, therefore , it is not always in ways that can be universally celebrated. To some extent, globalization amplifies structural inequalities that have existed for centuries, and while it may provide some opportunities for local actors, it also widens the scope for exploiting them. The appropriation of kente and adinkra for markets outside Ghana is partly due to the increased circulation of cultural goods in global markets. In the world-systems view, the world capitalist economy must constantly expand and does so...

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