Full Product Details
Author: Nina Sylvanus
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Dimensions:
Width: 1.50cm
, Height: 0.10cm
, Length: 2.30cm
Weight: 0.340kg
ISBN: 9780226397221
ISBN 10: 022639722
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 06 December 2016
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Out of stock
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.
Reviews
The <i>pagne</i> is an anthropological puzzle crying out for exploration, and Sylvanus guides us deep into the cultural, historical, economic, and aesthetic tangle, along the way providing a norm-shattering portrait of African women as producers and consumers in the global economy. She demonstrates how the dense materiality of fabric binds local human actors, material agency, the state, and capitalist forces together in mutually determining ways. This is one of the richest ethnographies yet written on cultural mixture and commodity chains, revealing that nothing about taste, design, or authenticity is as it first appears. It disrupts any conception of West African societies that is not already fundamentally global. --Sasha Newell, author of The Modernity Bluff
By providing a detailed history of this company and the intersecting histories of colonialism and printing techniques, Sylvanus shows how the company's recent brand publicity as both authentic African heritage and the latest new fashion reflects the company's attempts to manage the fast-paced competition for consumers of West African cloth, who have a range of manufactured wax and fancy print cloth from which to choose....The author also presents an excellent discussion of intellectual property rights, with the company, Vlisco, claiming legal and technical rights to its wax print textiles while Togolese women claim their own measures of value and ownership. --Choice Presents an ethnography of West African wax cloth, exploring the history, manufacture, and marketing of wax cloth and using data collected between 2000 and 2010 to illustrate political, economic, and gender relations in global capitalism. --Journal of Economic Literature Sylvanus's excellent multi-layered trans-historical study of Togolese wax-print fabric (or pagne) interweaves the role of African women in postcolonial developments, on the one hand, with a timely intervention in the 'China-in-Africa' debates on the other. . . . Provides essential reading not only for those interested in wax cloth, but also for those interested in its long-standing role in patterning relations between women, market and nation. --Africa
Author Information
Nina Sylvanus is assistant professor of anthropology at Northeastern University.
