African Textiles, Fashionable Textiles: A Historiography

I did not go looking for textiles, they came looking for me. I originally went to southern Madagascar in the late 1980s with the intention of studying funerary monuments, which from the nineteenth century had become ever more visible and elaborate. But in the village that graciously hosted me, women soon drew me into helping them card and spin cotton, which the neighboring village then dyed and wove into burial cloth. It became apparent that as much— or more—energy, artistry, and money went into weaving and shrouds than into tombs. Yet, when I proposed the dissertation topic of handweaving to my supervisor, a French archaeologist, he was aghast. Why this frivolous topic? He, like many others, would continually try to steer me to Malagasy funerary monuments, made by specialists—by men—of stone or carved wood. A microcosm of early African art history—with its notorious preference for sculpture—perhaps compounded by the fact that in Madagascar weavers are most always women. Female and frivolous, associations that scholars show fed into the academy’s longstanding rejection of textiles, dress, and fashion as serious subjects of inquiry. What set me free, and many in my generation, was the collective volume Cloth and Human Experience (Schneider and Weiner 1989). Its mostly feminist-anthropologist authors shed blinding light on the great social and aesthetic significance of cloth around the world and women’s creative agency in making and activating it. The volume’s chapter on Madagascar by Gillian Feeley-Harnik ultimately helped win over my supervisor to my cause. Typical of the time, few chapters focused on dress, and my own dissertation was in the mold of “the anthropology of cloth,” exploring the making, gifting, and ritual use of handweavings. Still far in the distance in the 1980s, as Victoria Rovine (2015) has observed in hindsight, was seeing fashionability in Africa; only in recent years has she, and many colleagues, replaced the noxious F-words with a set of I-words: innovation, impetus, intention, individual .... Thus, if some quarters were debating whether African textiles were worthy of study, others simply got on with it. Textiles rank among “the most potent field of an indigenous aesthetic,” as John Picton, an early pioneer in the field, concludes (this issue, p. 82). And researchers, for this and many other reasons, simply could not ignore them. In the 1970s and ‘80s, the pages of African Arts offered a steady stream of articles, mainly by female scholars, on particular traditions, many of which have come to form the familiar African textile canon: resist-dyed indigo, kente, ikats of the Dida, Kuba raffia, kaasa blankets, Akwete brocades, Sokoto robes. Articles included, too, newly invented traditions such as tapestry and screen printing, born of cooperatives. Major monographs and surveys appeared, with a volume of Textile History (Idiens 1980) dedicated to “traditional African weaving and textiles.” (For detailed overview of the historiography of African textiles, see Rovine 2015: 21–25; Eicher 2010; Picton, this issue.) And while these early works mainly documented techniques, technologies, trade, and stylistic spread, even so, one finds—in retrospect, surprisingly frequent— references to “adaptability” and innovation, to coproductions between clients and makers, even the recognition of short-lived fashion trends. The fall 1992 issue of African Arts on African textiles, guest edited by Lisa Aronson—herself among the trailblazers, identifying individual artist-weavers—marked a major moment, with articles by Monni Adams and T. Rose Holdcraft, Susan Domowitz, Lisa Aronson, Judith Perani and Norma Wolff, and Elisha Renne. Dedicated to the “Language of West African Textiles,” it moved the conversation from description to analysis of gendered dimensions of cloth making and the power of dress to communicate identities. During the same decades, art museums were opening their doors to African textiles, introducing them more widely to scholarly and public audiences alike, beginning in 1972 with Roy Sieber’s landmark exhibition African Textiles and Decorative Arts at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. John Picton’s equally influential 1995 exhibit The Art of African Textiles at the Barbican Gallery in London moved past the many intervening debates on “traditional” and “authentic” to broadly widen the canon, embracing contemporary textiles woven with new materials such as lurex, as well as industrially printed fabrics, so-called African prints, of which there will be more to say. In 2009, the Metropolitan Museum’s first exhibit on Africa textiles stressed their “essential art” and design. Hand in hand with exhibiting African textiles, several museums in Europe and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s sponsored large-scale collecting missions in West Africa. And although “African textiles” most usually meant (and today, still, often continues to mean) only sub-Saharan textiles, anglophone art historians would increasingly study and (re)connect the textile traditions of North Africa (Becker 2006; Gilvin 2015; Spring and Hudson 1995; Gerschultz 2019), and Madagascar (Green 1998; Mack 1988) to the subcontinent, expanding knowledge on “north-south” ties across the Sahara, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean. If textiles were, largely, unquestionably recognized as art, or, à la limite, good design, voices were rising that they could not be truly understood outside their usual end-use as dress, and to display textiles as twodimensional pieces “denies a vital part of their reality” (Becker 1995: 49). Some studies acknowledged—but usually did not develop—links between radical and rapid innovations in textile technique or design and patron desires for new clothing fabrics. In my own world of museums and textile studies, the term “textile” itself can be a systemic hindrance, one of the many unwanted categories inherited from the past, as JoAnne McGregor (2022: 7) laments in her introduction to Creating African Fashion Histories. In its strictest definition, “textile”— from the Latin textilis—includes only cloth woven on the loom, thus all too often excluding hides and barkcloth from overviews of African dress. Further tied to the root word for “text,” the term has led occasionally to forced readings of textiles as texts. Eurocentric divisions stalk my professional worlds, riding rough-shod over the wrapper (or draped) fashion systems of the Global South: many North American museums contain departments named “Textiles and Costume” or “Fashion and Textiles.” The unintended imputation is that a textile alone— an unstitched garment—is not dress or fashion. Our professional societies divide along the fault lines of Textile or Dress, with few crossing the line to participate in both worlds. Enter from stage left in the 1990s methodologies, theories, and interests from anthropology, history, and cultural studies, together with the wider “consumer culture” turn in the humanities which legitimated consumption as a creative act and topic of inquiry (Evans 2015). Anthropologist Joanne Eicher and her colleagues, notably T.V. Erekosima, blazed many methodological and analytic trails, within and without Africanist circles, the duo publishing on the “fashionable attire” of Kalabari cut cloth as early as 1981 in African Arts (Erekosima and Eicher 1981). They developed terminologies and tools for analyzing dress writ large—including imported goods—as a form of artistic expression, and dress’ roles in constructing identities of many kinds. Karen T. Hansen (2000) turned attention to imported secondhand clothing, how Zambian agency and creativity rendered it meaningful and fashionable. Historians such as Laura Fair (2001) and Colleen Kriger (2006) located fashion systems in the past, while multidisciplinary collective volumes edited by Allman (2004) and Hendrickson (1996) explored African fashion as practice, performance, and embodied identity. Institutional support for studies and publishing on African textiles and dress emerged at Indiana University with Roy Sieber and his cohorts, along with John Picton at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, and Joanne Eicher at the University of Minnesota. Simultaneously, dress and fashion studies were themselves rising, maturing, and looking to break with their Western focus, while the “global,” “material” and “consumption” turns in the humanities saw many disciplines—from cultural studies to literary criticism—turn their lenses on dress and, later, fashion. “By the late 1990s, fashion studies had truly emerged as a field in its own right. Fashion had become an acceptable topic of academic enquiry, instead of a notorious ‘f-word’” (Almila and Ingliss 2017: Sarah Fee is a Senior Curator of Global Fashion & Textiles at the Royal Ontario Museum and affiliated faculty at the University of Toronto. Her major exhibitions have explored the textiles arts of Madagascar and the painted and printed cottons of India. sarahf@rom.on.ca