Order and read Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke U.P., 2015) asap. In this uniquely interdisciplinary work, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism. Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lowe connects the liberal narrative of …

In 1994 Angela Davis wrote an article for Critical Inquiry attacking the media for representing her as a style icon. The discovery that the New York Times Magazine has named her one of America’s top “trendsetters” leads Davis to explore the terms of her public role to understand how her self-image measures against the visual politics of mainstream culture at a critical time for black politics. The core of “Afro Images”, now part of the …

Today Slate published a powerful animated map of the trans-Atlantic slave trade across time. It is a document to watch and share about a tragedy that we still know too little about.

Today the Costume Institute of the African Diaspora (CIAD) in London remembers the mooring at Tilbury Docks of the first Empire Windrush ship to the United Kingdom in 1948 with some great pictures of Caribbean immigrants in their best clothes and a post on Tumblr. The clothes captured in the shots encapsulate the hopes and expectations of thousands of imperial subjects who left the West Indies in search …

The cultural platform Ezibota has published an educational article on African textiles and the regional and cultural diversity the mainstream press and fashion system overlook when appropriating them. Have a read here. “The terms African print, ethnic prints or tribal prints should make you pause. Africa after all is a continent so when designers say African print, Which country out of the 54 that makes up the …

This post contains theoretical annotations on photo-manipulation that I am collecting for a publication on retro-looking fashion photography. *** Digital photography is the main medium of dissemination of vernacular sartorialism and, by extension, of the afrosartorial aesthetic. Selfies are the currency of countless blogs that promote racial cool/beauty/pride (Pham 2015), while fashion blogging depends on digital photography to document emerging trends (Rocamora …