NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art is out with a special issue on black fashion, featuring articles by eminent authors and artists. Its goal, as stated in the introduction by the editor Noliwe Rooks (Cornell University), is to approach the subject as “a launching point for thinking about race, gender, politics, powers, and class” (4). This is a good resource …

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 …

In her most recent publication, Victoria L. Rovine analyzes African fashion as a manifestation of African artistic expression. Beginning her study with the remark that ‘fashion tells stories’, the scholar follows in the path of an array of other eminent scholars in suggesting that dress is a form of communication (see, for example, Calefato 2004), whose powers of persuasion rely …