For 21st century Afrosartorialists, the suit is the material instantiation of exceptional cool. My newsfeed is filled with editorials and photostories that deploy the suit as the one garments that can fully magnify black empowerment and dynamism. It deconstructs symbolic abstractions that essentialize racial and ethnic identity, gluing Afro-diasporan blackness to positive visibility and diversity. An article in the Lens section of the New York Times celebrates …
African textiles carry a huge signifying power and are routinely used to express statements about the self. In my posts about the West African ankara/wax and Kenyan kanga textiles I argue that design amplifies their currency within and beyond Africa. The semantic potential of their abstract or partially-abstract patterns make the textiles a versatile channel of cultural translation. The textiles are also worn to express political …
Last May, Florence hosted the annual edition of Black Portraitures, a convention that has already brought together some of the most eminent scholars of Africana and black visual studies in the world in five previous occasions. This year, the event focused on: “exploring the impulses, ideas, and techniques undergirding the production of self-representation and desire, and the exchange of the gaze from the …
On March 6th, 2015 Tumblr and other social media hosted the first BlackOutDay to counter the notion that beauty is a whites-only affair. According to a statement published in the official page of the movement, on BlackOutDay black users “like and reblog selfies of each other and fill our dashboards with encouragement”. Since then, the day has been made seasonal, with the second event taking …
Here is an interview with Farai Simoyi, the Zimbabwean fashion designer who gained fame after working with Beyoncé.
Recently Africans have taken to Twitter to spread a narrative of the continent that is all about self-empowerment and pan-African accomplishments using the hashtag #TheAfricaTheMediaNeverShowsYou. Given the nature of the platform, the message is conveyed most powerfully via images. Beauty, and more generally aesthetic, plays a big part in this reconfiguration of the global imaginary, as shown in the report posted in the Guardian. …
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 …
