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Judith Perani and Norma H. Wolff
Berg Publishers, Oxford and New York, 1999. North American distributor: NYU Press. 217 pp., 19 b/w illustrations. $55 hardcover, $19.50 softcover.
Reviewed by Anne M. Spencer
The series Dress, Body, Culture, edited by Joanne B. Either, seeks to articulate, through an interdisciplinary approach, connections between culture and dress. Cloth, Dress and Art Patronage in Africa is a natural choice for inclusion. Judith Perani and Norma H. Wolff have a combined total of over fifty years of research experience focused on the Nupe, Yoruba, and Hausa. Here they set out to untangle the complex web of relationships between cloth and dress and those who patronize these arts, drawing on their extensive knowledge of Nigerian dress.
The book's underlying premise is that there must be a processual approach to understanding the dynamic nature of the interaction between patron, artist, and art. The authors demonstrate that patronage indeed involves more than an economic exchange, as both artists and art patrons are decision makers. It is out of this dynamic that cloth and dress traditions unfold.
The book is multifaceted in its approach, combining history with art and social historical perspectives, in keeping with the goals of the series. Although the focus is on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the discussion includes the antecedents of weaving traditions. The authors have admirably pulled together many strands of research on Hausa, Yoruba, and Nupe cloth traditions to give a full picture of these textile arts at the end of the twentieth century.
Perani and Wolff's orderly presentation begins in...