Creating African Fashion Histories

"Creating African Fashion Histories is an innovative and timely publication that marks a welcome turn in the writing of global fashion histories and the curation of works by Africa's historic and contemporary fashion creatives. This agenda-setting volume brings museum and sartorial practices into critical dialogue for the first time. The book is divided into three sections, each flowing organically onto the next. The first focusses on constructing fashion histories, the second on translations of fashion identities, and the third on new approaches to fashion curation that acknowledge our imperial and colonial pasts, whilst moving forward in an equitable manner. The contributing authors eloquently examine the tangled relationship between power, knowledge production, and the confounding misrepresentation of the continent—its people, histories and cultures—using African fashions as a starting point. The range of geographic locations featured, from Morocco to South Africa and Ghana to the Swahili coast, alongside the number of perspectives incorporated, present African fashions as varied and ever-changing. Close attention is paid to the political, economic, and cultural contexts that have shaped and continue to shape both fashion scenes and museum collections. These elements combine to suggest new ways of understanding and mapping not only African fashion histories, but the complexities of global cultural histories as a whole."—Christine Checinska, Curator of African and African Diaspora Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum

"This book is an important contribution at the intersection of fashion history, museum curatorial studies, and anti-colonial intellectual practice. Like the exhibition from which it comes, this work 'underlines both the urgent need for, and obstacles facing, efforts to bring about significant institutional change' within museums when it comes to the collection and display of African creative products. Thus, it is a work of importance for our times, as a reflection point for those engaged in the display of African fashion collections. As decolonization debates continue and many museums remain at the forefront of their subsumption into a neoliberal rhetoric that serves to maintain rather than disrupt the status quo, this volume's essays and the ideas they explore keep vital debates not only relevant, but useful for those who truly work toward continuing to disentangle museums from their colonial foundations. This thought-work is action, in critique of the dominant colonial paradigm. Read it."—Davinia Gregory-Kameka, Columbia University