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Fashioning Africa: Power and Politics of Dress ed. by Jean Allman Indiana University Press, 2004; 256 pages, 36 b&w photos, index. $50 cloth; $21.95 paper
reviewed by Joanne B. Eicher
Jean Allman's edited volume on African dress adds substantially to research on dress as nonverbal communication with its focus on power and politics. The book is a gem. I followed its development from attendance at the two panels of papers presented at the 2001 African Studies Association meetings to its publication in 2004, assigning it for my seminar on Dress and Culture, where it stimulated lively discussion. The chapter contributors are interdisciplinary, dominated by seven historians, followed by two anthropologists, an art historian, a dress scholar, and a communications specialist. Allman selected several writers already known to Africanists as having published books or articles on African dress, such as Judith Byfield (2002), Margaret Jean Hay (1992, 1996), Elisha Renne (1995), Victoria Rovine (2001), and Phyllis Martin (1996). Newcomers are Heather Akou, Marissa Moorman, Andrew Ivaska, and Boatema Boateng.
Allman's phrase "the sartorial study of power" (p. 4) succinctly introduces the common issues featured in the chapters. As a historian who normally deals with written documents in library or government archives, she points out that all contributors use "clothing or dress as an enormously valuable, yet largely untapped, archive" (ibid.). Allman's introduction also tackles the topic of modernity versus tradition, taking the stance that "tradition does not exist either prior to or in opposition to the modern" (p. 5), and she asserts that both tradition and modernity can and do exist simultaneously. She points out that textile examples used for dress and thought of as traditional, such as mudcloth from Mali and kente from Ghana, are used effectively as a base for contemporary fashions, and the chapters by Rovine on mudcloth ("Fashionable Traditions: The Globalization of an African Textile") and Boateng on kente ("African Textiles and the Politics of Diasporic Identity-Making") provide detailed analyses of her point of this dual existence.
In addition to the themes of power and politics, chapters illustrate how dress displays many other facets of identity, most particularly focusing on gender. In "Remaking Fashion in the Paris of the Indian Ocean: Dress, Performance, and the Cultural Construction of a Cosmpolitan Zanzibari Identity,"...