Product details
- ISBN 9781350327849
- Weight: 520g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 21 Mar 2024
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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“A revelation. Reclaiming fashion from its European history.” – Shane White
With a focus on sub-Saharan Africa, Fashioning the Afropolis provides a range of innovative perspectives on global fashion, design, dress, photography, and the body in some of the major cities, with a focus on Lagos, Johannesburg, Dakar, and Douala. It contributes to the ongoing debates around the globalization of fashion and fashion theory by exploring fashion as a genuine urban phenomenon on the continent and among its diasporas.
To date, “fashion” and “city” have not been systematically related to each other in the African context and, for too long, a western-centric gaze has dominated scholarship, resulting in the perception of Africa as provincial and its visual arts and textile cultures as static and folkloristic. This perspective is all the more distorted, given Africa’s rich sartorial past. With a huge number of tailors ready to adapt and renew clothing, reshaping garments into contemporary styles, and many cities in Africa becoming hot-spots for a steadily growing and well-connected scene of fashion designers in the past 20 years, the time is ripe for a reevaluation and reconsideration of the fashionscapes of Africa. Leading scholars offer an updated empirical and theoretical foundation on which to base new and exciting research on sub-Saharan fashion, challenging perceptions and offering new insights.
Kerstin Pinther is Professor of Arts and Material Cultures of Africa in the Department of Art History at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, Germany.
Kristin Kastner is Lecturer and post-doctoral researcher at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany.
Basile Ndjio is Professor of Anthropology, University of Douala, Cameroon, Central Africa, and Senior Research Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.
