Cosmopolitanism And Womens Fashion In Ghana

Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, this book delves into the rich world of Ghanaian fashion, demonstrating how, over time, local dress styles and materials have been fused with global trends to create innovative, high fashion garments that reflect a distinctly Ghanaian cosmopolitanism. Ghana has a complex and diverse fashion culture which was in evidence before independence in 1957 and has continued to grow in reputation in the postcolonial period. In this book, Christopher Richards reflects on the contributions of the country’s female fashion designers, who have employed fashion to innovate existing, culturally relevant dress styles, challenge gendered forms of dress, and make bold statements regarding women’s sexuality. Treated as artworks, the book examines specific garments to illustrate the inherent complexity of their design and how fashion is often embedded with a blending of personal histories, cultural practices and global inspirations. Reflecting in particular on the works of Laura Quartey, Letitia Obeng, Juliana Kweifio-Okai, Beatrice Arthur and Aisha Ayensu, this book makes an important and timely contribution to art history, fashion studies, anthropology, history, women’s studies and African Studies. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

In their respective temporal contexts, are explored in subsequent chapters. Specific fashions are examined in detail, illustrating how garments can encapsulate significant moments of cultural change, servings as physical manifestations of specific eras in the history of Ghana. The theoretical thread woven throughout this dissertation relates the fashions of Accra to a nationalist cosmopolitanism, illustrating that Ghanaian designers and their fashions embody this distinctive feature of Accra and its inhabitants. Richards ultimately argues that fashion is essential in ensuring the continuation of historical dress practices in Ghana and that the citizens of Accra have always been fashionable.

The crafts of governance and diplomacy are spectacular, theatrical, and performative. Performing Statecraft investigates the performances of states, their leaders, and their citizens on an expanded field of the global arts of statecraft to consider the role of performance in the domestic and international affairs of states, and the interventions into global politics by artists, scholars, and activists. Treating theatre as both an art form and a practice of political actors, this book draws together scholarship on the embodied dimensions of governance, the stagecraft of revolution, arts activism on the world stage, sports performance by heads of state, the performativity of national dress, speechmaking and colonialism, war and medicine, singing diplomats, indigenous sovereignties, and performed nationalisms. It brings the perspective and methods of performance studies to bear on global politics, offering exciting new insights into encounters between states, sovereigns, and people. Whether one is watching a campaign speech, a nightly news broadcast, a sacred dance, or a play about global conflict, these chapters make clear the importance of performance as a tool wielded by amateurs and professionals to articulate the nation in global spaces.

Explores both Zambian dress practices from the late-colonial period until the present and African contributions to globally circulating fashions.

The 20th century witnessed the large-scale displacement and dispersal of populations across the world because of major political upheavals, among them the two European wars, decolonization and the Cold War. These major events were followed by globalization which accelerated free trade and the mobility of capital, new technologies of communication, and the movement of people, commodities, ideas, and cultures across the world. This book explores the complexity of African migration and diaspora, the discourse of ‘diaspora engagement’ and new models of citizenship and transnationalism in the context of these issues. This book was originally published as a special issue of African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal.

The Nigerian and West African practice of aso ebi fashion invokes notions of wealth and group dynamics in social gatherings. Okechukwu Nwafor’s volume Aso ebi investigates the practice in the cosmopolitan urban setting of Lagos, and argues that the visual and consumerist hype typical of the late capitalist system feeds this unique fashion practice. The book suggests that dress, fashion, aso ebi, and photography engender a new visual culture that largely reflects the economics of mundane living. Nwafor examines the practice’s societal dilemma, whereby the solidarity of aso ebi is dismissed by many as an ephemeral transaction. A circuitous transaction among photographers, fashion magazine producers, textile merchants, tailors, and individual fashionistas reinvents aso ebi as a product of cosmopolitan urban modernity. The results are a fetishization of various forms of commodity culture, personality cults through mass followership, the negotiation of symbolic power through mass-produced images, exchange value in human relationships through gifts, and a form of exclusion achieved through digital photo editing. Aso ebi has become an essential part of Lagos cosmopolitanism: as a rising form of a unique visual culture it is central to the unprecedented spread of a unique West African fashion style that revels in excessive textile overflow. This extreme dress style is what an individual requires to transcend the lack imposed by the chaos of the postcolonial city.

Green lifestyles and ethical consumption have become increasingly popular strategies in moving towards environmentally-friendly societies and combating global poverty. Where previously environmentalists saw excess consumption as central to the problem, green consumerism now places consumption at the heart of the solution. However, ethical and sustainable consumption are also important forms of central to the creation and maintenance of class distinction. Green Consumption scrutinizes the emergent phenomenon of what this book terms eco-chic: a combination of lifestyle politics, environmentalism, spirituality, beauty and health. Eco-chic connects ethical, sustainable and elite consumption. It is increasingly part of the identity kit of certain sections of society, who seek to combine taste and style with care for personal wellness and the environment. This book deals with eco-chic as a set of activities, an ideological framework and a popular marketing strategy, offering a critical examination of its manifestations in both the global North and South. The diverse case studies presented in this book range from Basque sheep cheese production and Ghanaian Afro-chic hairstyles to Asian tropical spa culture and Dutch fair-trade jewellery initiatives. The authors assess the ways in which eco-chic, with its apparent paradox of consumption and idealism, can make a genuine contribution to solving some of the most pressing problems of our time.

From early department stores in Cape Town to gendered histories of sartorial success in urban Togo, contestations over expense accounts at an apartheid state enterprise, elite wealth and political corruption in Angola and Zambia, the role of popular religion in the political intransigence of Jacob Zuma, funerals of big men in Cameroon, youth cultures of consumption in Niger and South Africa, queer consumption in Cape Town, middle-class food consumption in Durban and the consumption of luxury handcrafted beads, this collection of essays explores the ways in which conspicuous consumption is foregrounded in various African contexts and historical moments. The essays in Conspicuous Consumption in Africa put Thorstein Veblen’s concept under robust critical scrutiny, delving into the pleasures, stresses and challenges of consuming in its religious, generational, gendered and racialised aspects, revealing conspicuous consumption as a layered set of practices, textures and relations. This volume shows how central and revealing conspicuous consumption can be to fathoming the history of Africa’s projects of modernity, and their global lineages and legacies. In its grounded, up-close case studies, it is likely to feed into current public debates on the nature and future of African societies – South African society in particular.

These volumes offer a one-stop resource for researching the lives, customs, and cultures of Africa's nations and peoples. Unparalleled in its coverage of contemporary customs in all of Africa, this multivolume set is perfect for both high school and public library shelves. The three-volume encyclopedia will provide readers with an overview of contemporary customs and life in North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa through discussions of key concepts and topics that touch everyday life among the nations' peoples. While this encyclopedia places emphasis on the customs and cultural practices of each state, history, politics, and economics are also addressed. Because entries average 14,000 to 15,000 words each, contributors are able to expound more extensively on each country than in similar encyclopedic works with shorter entries. As a result, readers will gain a more complete understanding of what life is like in Africa's 54 nations and territories, and will be better able to draw cross-cultural comparisons based on their reading.

"Fashion, an inherently cross-cultural and elite-oriented form of dress that embodies change through innovation, is one of the most meaningful and visually present forms of artistic expression on the African continent. The significance of African fashion is rapidly gaining recognition in academia, particularly in the field of art history (Gott and Loughran 2010, Hansen and Madison 2013, and Rovine 2015). Kabas and Couture: Contemporary Ghanaian Fashion is one of the first American exhibitions to focus on the cultural and historical significance of African fashion, centering specifically on the dynamic and enduring production of women's fashion in Accra, Ghana from the 1950s through the 21st century. Whereas the garments on display attest to the beauty, creativity, and vibrancy of Ghana's complex fashion culture, this publication provides a more detailed account of individual designers and the historical precedence of Accra's co-existing spheres of designer and kaba fashions. The ultimate intent of this exploration of Ghanaian fashion is to expand our understanding of fashion beyond Western predilections by shifting focus to the African continent."--Page 1.