abstracts
Patricia Bentley, Senior Curator at the Textile Museum of Canada
Magic Squares: An Examination of Their Metaphoric Significance in Muslim West African Visual Cultures
This paper looks at a 20th century West African shirt in the Textile Museum of Canada’s collection from several perspectives. The strip-woven cotton shirt is inscribed with Arabic writing referencing the 99 names of Allah, and with three drawings depicting magic squares (A magic square is an arrangement of n squared numbers, in such a way that each row, each column and each main diagonal has the same sum). The shirt embodies traditions of both Islamic literacy, in its written surface, and indigenous African textiles, in its strip-woven construction and hand-spun cotton material.
In charting the magic square’s development from an abstract numeric concept inspired by ancient and Islamic gematria, first to a metaphoric symbol and then to a concrete representation on textiles, several questions arise. Why is the magic square given so much prominence in Islamic West African symbolism? This question requires an examination of the interplay of Islamic and indigenous magico-religious practices in West Africa, particularly Mali, Senegal, and Northern Nigeria. It also leads to a more general question: how does a purely abstract concept – a magic square – transform into an embodied representation – a pattern woven or embroidered on cloth? I will seek to offer some answers to these questions, based on my research on speaking, writing, art making, and ritual in West African societies.
The shirt and other West African textiles in my study have been removed from their original cultural context and now dwell in the context of the visual culture of the Textile Museum of Canada. What are the implications of re-contextualizing them into an exhibition? Current notions of the function of a museum in the 21st century space of visual culture will be examined. My exhibition Magic Squares: The Patterned Imagination in Muslim Africa, set to open in May 2011 at the TMC, will provide the context for this aspect of the paper.
Beth A. Buggenhagen, PhD Assistant Professor of Anthropology Indiana University
Money Takes Care of Shame: Exchange and Value in an Era of Global Volatility in Global Senegal
Traders of the Muslim Sufi order, Tariqa Murid, have woven cargo and currency through official and unofficial spaces of the global economy to become an economic force in the Senegalese postcolony. Along these same routes, Murid migrants in New York City, and other global cities, have circulated the media of social production as well: cloth, matrimonial portraits and videos of life cycle rituals, and religious offerings, texts and images. Through participation in Murid translocal trade, disciples have entered into circuits of baraka (grace) through offerings to their shaykhs and of kersa (honor) through the display and bestowal of cloth by female kin and affines during naming and matrimonial rituals. These carefully crafted financial strategies have enabled Muridiyya to achieve forms of long-term social value, even during periods of volatility, and these strategies stand not as a response to crisis, but as an end in themselves producing new and unfolding forms, and generating new subjectivities. In looking at these multi-layered connections of prophets and profits I argue that debates over women's political control over reproduction, the Family Code and religious authority can be understood as struggles over the nature of value. By analyzing the financial underpinnings of this translocal community I show how social and moral orders are reconstituted in the Muslim postcolony in an era marked by the contradictory rise of the market and new modes of regulation related to the global War on Terror.
Laura L. Cochrane, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, Central Michigan University
Embodying heritage and contemporary community: Weaving in Ndem, Senegal
Weaving, with its 1,000 year history in West Africa, embodies both ancestral connections to an artisanal past and present-day ethnic and familial identities. Many weavers throughout Senegal maintain these meanings of past and present by talking about their craft as a practice of these ethnic and familial heritages, and by paying attention to contemporary art markets and arts innovations. After decades of drought and economic crises, though, many weaving villages have been abandoned, and weaving is often not a feasible way to make a living.
One community in central Senegal, Ndem, has created an artisanal NGO that seeks to re-validate weaving as a viable craft, along with its connection to ethnicity-based lineages of weaving. Weaving, along with its associated crafts of spinning, dying, and tailoring, has become the backbone of this local development project. With the profits from this NGO, its administrators have built schools, a clinic, and are working on sustainable agriculture in an arid environment. They foster international clients by marketing quality household goods and apparel. They foster international partnerships by demonstrating the NGO’s regional benefit, and inviting both individuals and grant-making organizations to partner with them in these enterprises.
How are weaving, and lineages of weaving, motivations for strengthening a community? How can an ancestral craft help a community adapt to changing social contexts? I argue that Ndem’s NGO is successful because it employs the regional social values of both weaving and kinship. Through in-depth interviews with both weavers and administrators in Ndem, I demonstrate the deep commitment both have to weaving as an embodiment of past heritages and present communities. I also explore how they are using this commitment to create a viable business in a contemporary global textile and apparel market.
Soelve Curdts, PhD. Princeton University & Fritz Thyssen Stiftung für Wissenschaftsförderung, Germany
The Girl
In J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Waiting for the barbarians, the magistrate forms a peculiar relationship with a woman who remains nameless. Instead, “the girl” increasingly manifests the magistrate’s own conflictedness about the empire. Hence, even an approach which may be read as benevolent (at least in some of its manifestations and appearances) continues to reduce “the girl” to objecthood just as outright cruelty had done.
On the other hand, collecting material objects, especially towards the end of the novel, acquires well-nigh symbolic significance, as the process (or its imagining) stands in for the complicated questions about history, the impossibility of its absence, and yet its continuing nightmare, which Coetzee’s work raises. The present paper interrogates the various cross currents of human beings remaining in nameless objecthood, and a materiality that is –potentially? impossibly? – productive of meaning and its (dis)continuities.
Ferdinand de Jong, University of East Anglia, UK
The Material Culture of Slave Trade Commemoration: Dress and Nudity in the Performance of Reconciliation at Gorée Island, Senegal
Throughout the eighteenth century, women traders at Gorée Island played a major role as intermediaries between European and African traders. Usually referred to as Signares, these women of mixed descent owned businesses and made a handsome profit in the slave trade. They used their income to finance a lavish lifestyle that incorporated domestic slaves, gold jewellery and dress made of cloth imported from Europe. Their material culture materialised their subject position as cosmopolitan creoles.
In 1978 Gorée Island was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site and many tourists and pilgrims have since visited the House of Slaves, a former slave depot from which slaves were deported to the New World. The historical account narrated by the curators of the House of Slaves represents the slave trade in black-and-white terms that go against the grain of the historical reality of the trade as a joint business between Europeans, Africans and Euro-Africans. Nonetheless, at many public commemorations of the slave trade Senegalese women paid by the Gorée community council perform as Signares. At one occasion they assisted in a public declaration against slavery.
Since the performers are not descendents of Signares and their own subject positions irrelevant to their performance, their choreography depends on the dress that makes them recognisable as Signares. In contrast, Senegalese men who perform as slaves at these commemorations wear loincloths only. This paper examines the appropriation of the material culture of the historical Signares and the undressed body of the slave in contemporary commemorative performances. It suggests that the historical material culture of the Signares has retained its association with high status, while the undressed body still associates its owner with slavery.
While the historical material culture of the Signares can be used to perform reconciliation because it is unclaimed in the present, the naked body cannot be used since it associates its owner too closely with slavery. The paper pursues the argument that the unclaimed material culture makes it available for diplomacy, while nudity makes the naked body unavailable for diplomacy. Theoretically, this demonstrates that material culture indeed creates subjectivity, while the objectivity of the naked body of the slave (the object) disables the making of subjectivity.
Jude Fokwang, PhD, Trent University
Fabrics of Identity: Modernity, Women’s Uniforms and Associational Life in Bamenda
The last two decades have seen a remarkable hike in the number of voluntary associations in the Cameroon grassfields, which predictably have become key markers of social organisation. Thus, many individuals tend to belong to more than one association, spread across ethnic, religious, neighbourhood, and rotating credit scheme associations etc. In addition to other factors, associations tend to construct their identity through “uniforms”, sewn from African wax prints imported from Europe, Nigeria, or locally produced. In this paper, I explore the possibility of associations as mediators of identity through clothing. I focus in particular on two women’s associations, the Chosen Sisters and the United Sisters, both located in the city of Bamenda, Cameroon. I examine in a preliminary way, the meanings that inform the role of “uniforms” in the construction and articulation of gendered identities, social hierarchies and visibility. I will argue that clothing styles (epitomised by uniforms) underscore the salience of local modernities and cosmopolitan identities.
Silvia Forni, PhD. Associate Curator of Anthropology in the Royal Ontario Museum, Department of World Cultures
Gendered technologies: Continuity and innovation in a Cameroonian pottery tradition
In many polities of the Cameroonian Grassfields, pottery is predominantly or exclusively a female art. The village on Nsei, located at the western end of the Ndop plain is unique in the comparable involvement of men and women in local pottery production. The paper analyzes continuity and transformations in potting technologies with a particular focus on gender restrictions and regulations. In particular I am interested in exploring how traditional interdictions that limited female production to non-figurative work based on mystical sanctions are played in the contemporary arena to exclude women from the more profitable and popular production directed towards the urban markets. Indeed, if today potting in Nsei is mostly a secular activity that does not require any particular initiation or ritual attention, women are still kept away from the production of figurative containers and figures despite the fact that most of the modern production is merely decorative and does not connect to the world of the palace regulatory societies for whom more traditional figurative work was produced. The paper will consider the economic and technological consequences of this mystically sanctioned division of labor as well as the strategies enacted by many skilled female potters to find alternative creative strategies to promote their production and manage to benefit economically from the popularity of the commercial items that distinguish Nsei contemporary production from other centers in the region.
Samba Gadjigo, PhD. Professor, Mount Holyoke College
The rope and the belt as symbols of rebellion and empowerment in Ousmane Sembene's films and prose fiction.
Since the publication of his first fictional work The Black Docker (1956) to the release of his last feature film Moolaade (2004), Ousmane Sembene has always featured African women at the very center of his creative imagination. However, unlike many male counterparts of his generation, Sembene has always projected women, not as mere shadows of men but rather as both trustees of African cultural values and as agents of positive change. In this paper I will examine how Sembene hijacked and deflected the tropes of the rope and that of the belt to suggest the changing role of women in African Wolof, Jola, and Jula societies. My study will take a cursory look at the use of the rope and the belt throughout Sembene's creative work with a special focus on the novel God's Bits of Wood (1960) and the films Borom Saret (19630; Emitai (1971); Heroism au quotidien (2000) and Moolaade (2004)
Suzanne Gott, Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan
Cloth and Beads in Southern Ghana as Sites of Intercultural Engagement and Strategic Interaction
At women’s funerals in Ghana’s Ashanti Region, customary burial gifts of costly imported factory-print textiles and strands of imported or locally produced waistbeads make manifest the special, gendered importance of cloth and beads.
This paper examines the historical development and ongoing significance of glass beads and African factory-print cloth as particularly resonant modes of intercultural engagement and strategic interaction, or ‘cultural diplomacy’.
Glass beads imported into West Africa over centuries of trans-Saharan and trans-Atlantic trade were incorporated into political regalia, personal adornment, and religious practices. These long-distance trading networks also stimulated the development of West Africa’s distinctive “powder-glass” beadmaking arts. In southern Ghana, imported and locally produced strands of women’s waistbeads constitute the most fundamental form of female dress, enhancing women’s sexuality and, according to customary belief, women’s fertility.
African-print cloth—a factory-produced textile developed in Europe initially inspired by Indonesian batik designs and techniques—is the result of European manufacturers’ concerted efforts to meet African consumers’ exacting standards of quality and particular regional tastes and fashion trends. In the early 1960s, following independence, Ghana opened its own African-print textile factories, building and expanding upon established designs. In Ghana, higher quality imported and locally produced African-print textiles have been invested with special gendered significance as relatively inviolable forms of women’s wealth.
Since the mid-1990s, major changes have taken place as a result of neo-colonial economic policies and increasing globalization. IMF and World Bank-instituted structural adjustment programs and trade liberalization policies have resulted in increasing economic hardship that has had a devastating impact on women’s ability to possess both imported and locally produced heirloom beads and African-print textiles.
In this paper, I will examine these intercultural dynamics of political and economic disparity, and the cultural strategies that maintain and transform these two expressive forms.
Mary Hark, Studio Artist, Assistant Professor of Textile Design, Design Studies Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
SEAM: Mixed Media Textile Paintings a visual consideration of place through the lens of a textile aesthetic
For the last five years my artistic and intellectual research has been focused on the cloth-making traditions and textile communities of Kumasi, Ghana. Studying the Adinkra stamped funeral cloth, interviewing and observing cloth vendors, seamstresses, batik dyers and Kente weavers has fueled my imagination and provided a rich bank from which to consider what a textile can mean and how it can move in the world. I have responded to this emersion into a culture where cloth is fully appreciated and integrated into every aspect of life, with a series of mixed media textile-paintings.
I propose to speak from the viewpoint of a maker; a practicing textile artist with a presentation heavily supported with visual information. I will describe the sources that informed this body of work, the relationships that have developed around it, and the questions that have evolved out of a visual consideration of place through the lens of a textile aesthetic.
Paula Heinonen, PhD. International Gender Studies Centre, University of Oxford
Defining African Culture in the context of a Globalized World with examples from Ethiopia
Culture matters. Its enduring strength is in its role in helping us distinguish between cultures, the difference between ‘ourselves’ and the ‘others’, and even as a concrete concept embodying our lived-in experiences. For example, in reference to material culture in East-Africa, much is written about Bantu, Nilotic and Cushitic cultures and the art works and artefacts, which stem from them. Nevertheless, in spite of the multitude of cultures, languages and world-views existing on the African continent, more often than not ‘culture’ in ‘African culture’ is used as a self-explanatory concept or as a discursively neutral simple fact, thus homogenizing the peoples of Africa and projecting the existence of their commonly held worldview. Informed by African Feminists writings and personal research, the paper explores the diverse and contradictory popular and academic ideas about African culture that shapes the global image of contemporary Africa and Africans.
Amal Mohammed Hassan Jamal, PhD. McGill University
Kel Azjer Tuareg Culture: Public and Private Space in Ghat
This paper presents a study of the urban form of the Old Town of Ghat, the historical sultanate of the Kel Azjer Tuareg, located in the Libyan Sahara. It provides a comprehensive analysis of selected public and private spaces of this collective artifact in order to comprehend and document the relationship between this Saharan town’s architecture and Ghatian society. The study illustrates how Ghat’s vernacular architecture represents a range of culturally distinct meanings and values and how this architecture reflects Ghatian life.
The research presented in this paper explores Ghat’s spaces at three levels of its urban environment: the home (domestic), the neighbourhood (communal), and the town (public). It focuses on the relationship between the social aspects of Ghatian culture and the formation and use of the town’s spaces. In order to analyze the built environment of Ghat and the pattern of use of public and private spaces, the paper investigates the Azjer Tuareg culture and documents the various existing nomadic and semi-nomadic Azjer Tuareg housing typologies in Libya. It examines not only the contribution of the socio-cultural practices of this culture to the way spaces were configured, organized, and used, but also the Ghatian peoples’ daily and seasonal routines as well as their various social and economic activities. The study of Ghat’s public and private spaces includes a brief documentation and interpretation of their visual and aesthetic spatial qualities.
This paper also investigates the affect of trans-Saharan trade and the colonization and ruling history of Old Ghat on its formation and growth as well as the creation of public and private spatial domains in an attempt to understand the embedded meanings of Ghat’s built environment. The role of climate in the formation of Old Ghat and the ingenious architecture and structure of its dwellings is also investigated. This architecture reflects local construction techniques and limited local resources, consequently imparting distinct meaning to the built form of Ghat.
Netta Kornber, Sarah Nesib & Gethenesh Berthe , University of Toronto
Fashion’s Many Faces: Aesthetics, Representation and African Spaces
In what realms of life does fashion participate? Is fashion a form of art? An object of culture? A commodity? Can it have political implications? All of the above? In what ways does fashion inform our knowledge of African spaces- as a continent, within regions, different countries, nationhood, cities, rural areas and urban areas,- and the people who occupy them? Specific to Fashion shows,do all the pieces of clothing in the fashion show count as fashion? Why or why not?
Marieme Lo, PhD., Assistant Professor Women & Gender Studies and African Studies, University of Toronto
Senegalese women traders: embodying a gendered economics of aesthetics & consumption
Senegalese marketplaces reflect material and performative sites unveiling the savvy and adaptive marketing strategies of women traders and entrepreneurs, branding and selling a wide array of basic commodities, cosmetics and apparels, and a rich panoply of artisanal and iconic objects of cultural identity. Such objects and commodities, imbued with symbolic value, mercantile meanings, and social functions, appeal to the aesthetic sense and identity of consumers, women in particular. For women traders who often assume the roles of local fashion trend setters or consultants on matrimonial matters, economic practice is underpinned by the display of virtuosity and ingenuity in the production, discursive framing and embodiment of cultural products.
This paper interrogates the production, marketing, circulation and consumption of cultural commodities and artifices of aesthetics and their underlying economic, gendered and social meanings. It argues that women traders, by fashioning selves and identities through mundane economic transactions, embody, signify, and entrench an economics of aesthetics and consumption that is gendered, mutually-constituted, and socially-embedded. This paper concludes by questioning the futures of such economies and modes of production at the interstice with increasing commoditization and globalized production.
D. Soyini Madison, Professor Northwestern University
Women's Spaces: Tradition, the Body, and Performance as Social Action
My paper will center around issues of the female body as it moves and functions within certain traditional spaces and how particular women use specific performance tactics as means of protection and resistance within these spaces. I will illustrate this through examples from my fieldwork in Ghana and Kenya.
Keli Maksud, BFA, Visual Artist
A question of Origin
Through an exploration of factory printed “African” fabrics my current body of work mainly deals with the ongoing discourse around cultural hybridity and the construction of identity. Textiles throughout Africa have had a long history which highlights an ambivalent relationship that Africa has with Europe. By investigating this relationship, I try to unravel a complex history of origin, which runs hand in hand with my own sense of selfhood. Many of these fabrics were first introduced to many countries throughout Africa by the European colonizers. The irony of this process is how these fabrics have come to connote an authentic African identity. What is significant here is that these fabrics serve as mobile signs, which refuse a final destination.
I found it effortless to use collage as my methodology as it speaks of my own hybrid experience. Attached are a series of mixed media collages which interweave cultural signifiers blurring the boundaries between the East and the West. I propose to speak of this hybridic experience that is highlighted through this exploration. I will describe the sources that informed this body of work and the questions that have evolved through this investigation.
Jean Mbaga, Lecturer, Dept of History, University of Douala Cameroon and Georges Djatsa Maffo, Lecturer Dept of Anthropology University of Douala
‘Cloths’ for social distinction in nowadays Bamun Empire
The social and cultural survival of the Bamun Empire in modern Cameroon largely hinges on strong and remarkable symbolisms and outward practices that have spanned across generations and now significantly underlie their cultural dynamics.
The use of ‘cloths’ in the Bamun kingdom is highly indicative of social identity and position. For centuries indeed, the Bamun leadership has been able to maintain unchallenged power and authority the sustenance of which required that, ubiquitously however, state agents and other beneficiaries of state power incarnate via special outfits the central apparatus of coercion, violence and social order.
European penetration and ultimately national political independence half a century ago dealt a serious blow at Bamun sovereignty but the symbolism of cloths survived, interestingly leaving a whole bank of cultural expressiveness and a boulevard for grasping a people’s administrative past and part of the reasons for long lasting stability ever associated with the Bamun kingdom.
Within the context of the global economy marked by interrelatedness and intense exchanges, the central administration of Cameroon in Yaoundé has demonstrated a willingness to grant a certain degree of political and social autonomy to the Bamun kingdom in the Noun Division. As more interest is now targeted to exploring the depth of King Njoya’s colourful attires and those of his entourage, a sudden outburst in local traditional cloth handicraft is quickly noticed among the Bamun people. In actual fact, families, kinships, royal lineages, social dignitaries, distinguished personalities among the Bamun re-enact their positions vis-à-vis the kingdom while claiming privileges, power, lost glory, prestige as the case may be through the medium of cloths. The paper also shows the trajectory cloths have taken in the course of the history of the Bamun people as well as their present day social significance.
Maimuna Mohamud, M.A. Global Gender Studies, SUNY University at Buffalo
New Diasporic Interpretations of the Guntiino: Re-defining Clothing, Re-affirming Identities. Exploring Memory, Homelands and the Generational Gap among Somali Women in the Diaspora
The Guntiino has been a constant in the wardrobe of the Somali woman. It had accompanied her through various stages of her history. The Guntiino was, and still is, worn by the pastoralist woman. During eras of independence and the formation of the Somali state, it was a marker of her identify. It was modern, cosmopolitan and reflective of the new Somali woman. During subsequent years of conflict, the Guntiino had retreated only to re-emerge in different lands and settle with the new communities of Somalis in the diaspora.
The diasporic Somali woman—who was raised in Somalia—sees her Guntiino as the memory of her homeland. The new generation of Somali diasporic woman, comparatively, uses it to connect with her homeland. This paper interrogates the relationship between this article of clothing and the young Somali diasporic woman of today. In which ways does this piece symbolize Somalia? What is the implication of generational difference in attributing a different meaning to the Guntinno? The generation of my mother defines it as a memory, while my generation characterizes it as a treasured connection to our homeland. These dynamics are marked by ways in which conflict, displacement and the dialectical relationships between time and space play a role in the formation of a diasporic interpretation of an ancient Somali piece of clothing.
Emmanuel Nuesiri, PhD. & Orock Tanye Besong
The Ubiquitous ‘Classless’ CICAM of Cameroon
Cotonniére Industrielle du Cameroun (CICAM) is a textile manufacturer that produces printed loincloths in Cameroon. The loincloths are extremely popular across Cameroon amongst men and women irrespective of cultural and economic background. The ‘CICAM material’ or just ‘CICAM’ as they are popularly known in Cameroon are used as uniform wear by cultural, religious and professional associations during group or associational festivities. It is common to find printed CICAM materials with motifs or images of persons related to the association that put in an order for that batch of prints. During political campaigns, the various political parties distribute CICAM materials to their members to wear during street campaigns and major rallies.
At the individual level, during weddings, birth and death celebrations, it is considered a mark of affluence for the celebrants to provide CICAM materials to family and friends to be worn uniformly during the occasion. The more affluent families would not buy prints already in the market but would place special orders to CICAM to provide custom made prints for the family. Amongst Cameroonian women the CICAM material has been honoured as the loincloth of choice for all women during celebrations marking the annual International Women’s Day. The question at this point is: how did CICAM come to attain this ubiquitous acceptance amongst Cameroonians irrespective of class and economic status? What makes this cheap loincloth so appealing?
This paper traces the origins of the CICAM Company and its marketing strategy to draw out lessons on how material culture is shaping identity in Cameroon. The paper looks into the local cultures of the ethnic groups most associated with the use of the CICAM loincloths to identify elements within these cultures that have made them most accommodating of CICAM. Lastly the paper presents the views of Cameroonian women from different cultures and economic status on the reasons behind the selection of CICAM as the cloth of choice for all women during celebrations of the International Women’s Day. This paper thus shows the actors and processes involved in the functional and transactional use of CICAM as a mark of identity in Cameroon.
Modupe Olaogun, Department of English, York University
“Nigeria Performs in Canada” was the headliner of the promotional flyer issued by the office of the Nigerian High Commissioner in Ottawa for the Benue Dance Troupe’s tour of parts of Canada from June 13th to July 3rd, 2009. The dance troupe is an arms-length unit of Benue State, one of the 36 current states of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The troupe performed in six Canadian cities, five of them located in southern Ontario and one in Montreal. The performances took place in formal halls, on streets, in parks, night clubs and in a church. In the Canadian arena, the Benue Dance Troupe functions in two capacities: as a synecdoche for the Nigerian nation and as an expressive symbol of Benue State, which directly finances its activities. This paper examines some of the performative aspects of the troupe’s Canadian tour performance, as captured by a commemorative documentary commissioned by the Nigerian High Commission in Ottawa, “Diplomatic Swange,” shot and produced by Bayo Akinfemi, and from a live performance that I watched on June 26th, 2009. Specifically, the paper suggests that, in addition to its formal overture towards strengthening Nigeria-Canada relations, the programme of the dance troupe performs a secondary and more covert re-presentation of gender, a re-presentation which constitutes a projective vision of transformations in the Nigerian political and social status quo, and in the points of contact in Canada-Nigeria relations. The paper illustrates its thesis through an examination of two of the dances, “Swange Dance” and “Tsue Tsele”—a dance of the leopard. It observes a remarkable feminization of these dances by the Benue Dance Troupe that suggests a broader significance beyond the exercise in cultural diplomacy.
Oyeronke Oyewumi, PhD. Associate Professor of Sociology and Women & Gender Studies - SUNY at Stony Brook, USA
Keynote speech: Beyond Gendercentric Models: Historicizing Identities in Discourses of African Art and Aesthetics
Ato Quayson, FGA Professor of English and Director Center for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto
Political Semiotics of Dress in West Africa
Writing occupies and ambiguous position between literacy and orality in Africa. What this means essentially is that even when we take the well established traditions of incorporating messages into the design of cloths, trinkets, and other elements of dress seriously, we are obliged to relate these to the wider discursive frameworks of incorporating messages that can be seen across a variety of surfaces including on canoes, passenger lorries, obituary posters, etc. Added to this is the fact that the more traditional media of kente and adinkra cloth have now been appropriated as part of popular street culture to the extent that what was the exclusive meaning-making domains of these cloth media are now shared with other dimensions of social life. My talk will be focused on outlining the general semiotics of these message-laden sartorial media and the inter-relationships they establish with other popular cultural sites.
Elisha P. Renne, Professor, Department of Anthropology and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Veils, Gender, and Material Expressions of Piety in Northern Nigeria
Assumptions about what veils are and veiling means underscore the contingent ways that particular material things are associated with gendered representations of religion. In the past “taking the veil” in Western societies meant becoming a nun, while veiling by Jewish women in 19th century Morocco reflected their particular identity as Sephardic Jews. In Northern Nigeria, Hausa Muslim women, who continue to wear a range of textiles as veils—some locally made, some imported from the Middle East, China, and Europe to cover the head, face, and at times, the entire body—are exclusively associated with veiling at present. However, in the 19th century, Hausa-Fulani rulers wore face veils as well as large turbans consisting of lengths of cotton cloth which were associated with a Muslim identity. With the advent of colonial rule in the early 20th century, these distinctive gendered uses of cloth as face and head-coverings shifted as emirs abandoned face cloths in favor of turbaning styles which covered the lower face while other Muslim men wore caps or different styles of turbans. Concurrently, both royal women and commoner women incorporated quantities of imported manufactured textiles into their head and body covering repertoires. During in the 1950s, as more Northern Nigerians traveled by air to perform hajj, new styles of veils and turbans were brought back and worn, underscoring the significance of head-coverings associated with Mecca. By the 1970s, the meanings associated with veiling shifted again as a new style of head covering—the hijab—was introduced from the Middle East by Nigerian Muslim leaders associated with the Islamic reformist movement known as Izala. In this paper, I consider political, social, and economic events as well as the negotiated responses of religious leaders and Muslim women and men to them during the 19th and 20th centuries in Northern Nigeria, as reflected in the use of particular textiles as veils and turbans, material expressions of shifting gendered and religious identities.
Patricia Stamp, Professor Emerita of African Studies and Women’s Studies, York University
Kenya, Kiondos and Cultural Diplomacy: Reviving Kamba Women’s Autonomy
This presentation, illustrated with pictures and videos, tells the story of the evolution of a simple craft contract into an empowering cultural exchange between the alumnae of an American women’s university and a group of Kamba women weavers. Popularized in the west as “Annie Hall” baskets by Woody Allen’s 1970s movie, kiondos – tightly woven sisal baskets with leather handles – have been increasingly appropriated by Kenyan middle-men and Western handicraft vendors, at the expense of the women who spend up to a week weaving one for the paltry sum of less than five dollars. This loss of control over their labour coincides with the decline of the historic age grade associations that put younger women’s labour under the control of women elders, thereby providing a counterbalance to the economic and social power of men amongst the Bantu-speaking societies of central Kenya. Formerly patrilineal but not patriarchal, these societies have devolved to individual male control of households, with attendant stricter, patriarchal control of women.
The presenter volunteered to commission kiondos to be used as insignia in the parade of her Class of 1965 at the 2010 Wellesley College Reunion. The fulfillment of this contract expanded into a complex transaction, fraught with difficulties, ultimately rewarding, between the two groups of women, so dramatically different in their economic circumstances and life experiences. In the course of it, the Kabati Women’s Kiondo Group discovered the possibility of recreating the conditions that formerly led to their autonomy in the face of male domination, while the Class of 1965 discovered their identity as a Kenya-style “age grade association,” and an enthusiasm for a grassroots women-to-women relationship. This illuminating instance of cultural diplomacy hints at the possibility, in Foucauldian terms of subverting the problematic “positive power” inherent in most Gender and Development aid donor – aid recipient relationships. The study draws on the presenter’s three decades of work on Kenyan women’s self-help groups and women’s political power in Kenya.
Gary van Wyk PhD., Curator Axis Gallery, New York
Flying the Flag: Beadwork and Dress Articulating Belonging and Resistance in South Africa
This paper explores some of the historical roles beadwork and traditional dress in southern African cultures have played in fashioning identities, expressing politics, enshrining memory, and, more recently, providing economic and social empowerment. Among the Xhosa, shifts in dress from 1820s onward incorporate materials available through a colonial economy that eventually decimates the population, yet these imported materials continue to play a key role in signifying Xhosa identity through the 1960s. Nelson Mandela goes to his treason trial dressed in traditional Xhosa beads and clothing to challenge the apartheid court. Yet, the cornerstone of apartheid policy is to separate the black majority by relegating each ethnicity to its own “homeland,” and soon the signification of ethnic dress reverses and becomes associated with collaborators of the “homeland” authorities. Upon Nelson Mandela’s release, however, this reverses once again, and ethnic beadwork and dress are re-appropriated as signs of Africanist pride. Similarly, among the Zulu, changes in beadwork colors, symbolism, and designs over time mirror key historical moments and shifting social and political alliances. The recent HIV-AIDS crisis, along with political upheavals in the region have generated a body of horrific memories, which Zulu women have embroidered with beads into “memory cloths,” both preserving social histories and transporting the women into international art circuits. Among the Basotho and Ndebele, clothing symbolism is tied to ideas about architecture and gendered space, which both cultures have used as platforms to express identity and covert resistance to apartheid.
Angela Washington-Thibodeaux, PhD( ABD) Capella University
In Search of the Black Victorian: Black and the Transnational Phenomena of Skin Bleaching
This work-in-progress research explores the transnational practice of skin bleaching among Black women and seeks to define it as a collective social response to white identity through beauty aesthetics. The nineteenth century Victorian concepts of the “Lady” and “Cult of True Womanhood,” expresses one manner in which the black female identity challenges and relocates itself into an imagined social and cultural attainment of whiteness. Arguably, skin bleaching has emerged as a “white neurosis,” an imagined social and cultural movement towards attaining whiteness in the physical body and through social status. Is this an effort to create a new hybridity of other, or is the practice indicative of self-hate? Tracing the practice between the U.S and Africa, it may suggest a panoptic which exposes a purposeful interrogation of forces from the explorations of scientists and missionaries, to the capitalist pursuit of “exotic” lands. The production, soliciting and use of skin bleaching products in West Africa, reveal the unregulated dumping and circulation of dangerous bleaching products into global Black communities, and unveils the phenomenon when “white neurosis” gives rise to the elusive “Black Victorian.”
CONTACTS
Marieme Lo, PhD: marieme.lo@utoronto.ca or call (416) 946 3218
Netta Kornberg: kornberg.netta@gmail.com
Sarah Nesib: sara.nesib@utoronto.caORGANIZERS
Marieme Lo, New College, African Studies, and Women and Gender Studies Institute Organizing committee: Netta Kornberg, Sarah Nesib, Dr. Dickson Ejoh, Angela Fleury, Dr. Sarah Fee, and Dr. Silvia Forni
All events are free and open to the public - Registration at: gmccd.ut@gmail.com