A01=Nina Sylvanus
aesthetics
african
anthropologists
anthropology
Author_Nina Sylvanus
capital
Category=JBCC2
Category=KNDD
circulation
cloth
colonial
colonialism
design
economy
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_isMigrated=0
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
exchange
gender studies
global trade
historical
history
identity
international
labor
material culture
materiality
patterns
political
politics
postcolonial
postcolonialism
power
production
textile manufacture
textiles
togo
togolese women
transnationalism
wax
west africa
Product details
- ISBN 9780226397221
- Weight: 340g
- Dimensions: 15 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 06 Dec 2016
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
In this book, Nina Sylvanus tells a captivating story of global trade and cross-cultural aesthetics in West Africa, showing how a group of Togolese women through the making and circulation of wax cloth became influential agents of taste and history. Traveling deep into the shifting terrain of textile manufacture, design, and trade, she follows wax cloth around the world and through time to unveil its critical role in colonial and postcolonial patterns of exchange and value production. Sylvanus brings wax cloth's unique and complex history to light: born as a nineteenth-century Dutch colonial effort to copy Javanese batik cloth for Southeast Asian markets, it was reborn as a status marker that has dominated the visual economy of West African markets. Although most wax cloth is produced in China today, it continues to be central to the expression of West African women's identity and power. As Sylvanus shows, wax cloth expresses more than this global motion of goods, capital, aesthetics, and labor it is a form of archive where intimate and national memories are stored, always ready to be reanimated by human touch.
By uncovering this crucial aspect of West African material culture, she enriches our understanding of global trade, the mutual negotiations that drive it, and the how these create different forms of agency and subjectivity.
Nina Sylvanus is assistant professor of anthropology at Northeastern University.
