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 …

Textiles are the most representative symbol of the globalization of African fashion (Rovine 2014). A young generation of stylists and designers based in various regions of the continent consistently employs them to express and export a style imbued with pan-African pride. The turn to an African-inspired aesthetic able to drive fashion’s regeneration at the global level is evident in the widespread practice of cutting fabric …

Last Monday an article by Robb Young appeared online in Business of Fashion. The article is a sort of blueprint to understand the hype surrounding the African fashion industry and, by extension, to decode the mainstream rhetoric and cultural politics that frame it. Young discusses Africa’s contribution to the global fashion industry, contending, as an increasing number of commentator do, that the continent has the potential to become a …

Troubling Vision (2011) is a key text for studying blackness and black identity from the point of view of visual studies. I am compelled by Fleetwood’s analysis of the double bind of blackness as something that saturates the field of vision, “troubling it” while also remaining complicit to, and thus reproducing, normative framings of racial difference. At the core of her …

To promote its 2015 Autumn Winter collection, Ben Sherman released a fashion film shot in Johannesburg in collaboration with a team of African talents. These include South African American director Meja Shoba, the Congolese musician Pierre Kwenders, and the Johannesburg-based collective Boys of Soweto (BOS), featuring as protagonists and stylists. The two-minute film takes place on a sports field, where three …

Stacey Tyrell is a Canadian artist who uses photography to explore themes of race, identity, and heritage in the African diaspora. In her most recent work, “Backra Bluid”, she envisions the hybrid lineage of Afro-diasporans, creating a gallery of self-portraits in which she impersonates her white ancestors. The titles of the photographs report only the name and age of each subject, leaving the viewer to guess the history …

de genere: journal of literary, postcolonial and gendered studies has just issued its first call for papers. Please make note of it and pass word to anybody who might be interested in contributing to an exciting new publication. The online open-access academic journal de genere offers a space for interdisciplinary research and critical debate in gender and postcolonial studies. The journal will be published …

Last week I stumbled upon the online exhibition Sailors and Daughters: Early Photography and the Indian Ocean curated by Erin Haney, which exhibits photographic documents from the early 20th century of the everyday lives of the maritime societies of East Africa, the Persian Gulf and other Indian Ocean ports. This is a notable curatorial work for many reasons, not least because it shares material that is …

About one year has passed since An African City debuted on YouTube and this web series about five girlfriends in their thirties who relocate to Ghana from the US continues to be one of few audiovisual works aimed at a Western audience that explicitly addresses Afropolitanism. Compared to the host of existing scholarship (Mbembe), online resources, and photographic works focusing on the experiences of cosmopolitan Africans based …