Patterns in Circulation

Cloth, Gender, and Materiality in West Africa

Nina Sylvanus

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780226397221, 9780226397191
• eBook ISBN: 9780226397368
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, Nina Sylvanus tells a captivating story of global trade and cross-cultural aesthetics in West Africa, showing how a group of Togolese women—through the making and circulation of wax cloth—became influential agents of taste and history. Traveling deep into the shifting terrain of textile manufacture, design, and trade, she follows wax cloth around the world and through time to unveil its critical role in colonial and postcolonial patterns of exchange and value production.
           
Sylvanus brings wax cloth's unique and complex history to light: born as a nineteenth-century Dutch colonial effort to copy Javanese batik cloth for Southeast Asian markets, it was reborn as a status marker that has dominated the visual economy of West African markets. Although most wax cloth is produced in China today, it continues to be central to the expression of West African women's identity and power. As Sylvanus shows, wax cloth expresses more than this global motion of goods, capital, aesthetics, and labor—it is a form of archive where intimate and national memories are stored, always ready to be reanimated by human touch. By uncovering this crucial aspect of West African material culture, she enriches our understanding of global trade, the mutual negotiations that drive it, and the how these create different forms of agency and subjectivity.
 

One

Fashioning the Body: Dressing the Public Self

When I visited my friend Atsoupi on a steamy day in December 2010, she was carefully planning her outfit in preparation for a wedding celebration that promised to be the talk of the town. The special occasion was highly anticipated by many in the city. “All of Lomé will be there,” Atsoupi told me with great excitement in her voice. Atsoupi did not personally know the bride and groom, but her boyfriend had invited her to accompany him. She took this invitation very seriously. Fully resolved to make this the occasion for an especially fashionable appearance, Atsoupi had saved up money to purchase a pagne she had always wanted to own. She had clear ideas of what to do with it and was determined to carry out her vision. “I’ve already spoken to the tailor about the cut,” she informed me. “It will be beautiful!”

A few days later, I accompanied Atsoupi to the market. While we strolled through aisles of shops filled with endless bolts of colorful cloth, Atsoupi spoke passionately about different patterns and the stories they evoke. She then chose “La Cible,” the radiating sunburst pattern 14/0663. “I’ve liked this pattern since I was a little girl,” she explained when I asked about her fabric choice. “It attracts the eye in this very special way; it bedazzles! And it moves so nicely on the body. It’s really a classic . . . my grandmother had it. It never goes out of style.” But instead of choosing the conventional red, blue, and yellow color combination, she wanted a more glitzy hue to work on and through her skin. “I want my outfit to shine and catch people’s eyes,” she said decisively. “I think the bright green and blue will do it. What do you think?” But before I could comment on her aesthetic choice, Atsoupi spoke about the symbolic value of the chosen cloth. “People will know this pagne, and they will appreciate that I value our heritage. They will comment on the beauty of it and how I combine tradition with modern style,” she said with conviction.

The evaluation of pagne fashions is particularly complex. The ability to “read” pagne includes knowing its history and context and identifying its place in a hierarchy of value denoted by origin and quality. Togolese use the terms tsigan (“big one”) to indicate a high-value pagne, while tsivi refers to the “small” value of the cloth, also called petit pagne (small pagne). European-imported wax cloth is tsigan; it provides maximum “sparkle” and is preferred by fashion-conscious urbanites. The innovativeness in design, colorfastness, and high-quality cotton of the resin-resist wax print firmly locates that cloth in the high-value register. By contrast, the less durable, roller-printed “fancy” print is tsivi. Historically, these two types of factory-printed cloth have dominated West African markets; together they fall under the umbrella category African print cloth. Although inferior in quality to resin-resist printed cloth (hereafter referred to as wax print or wax cloth), the much more affordable fancy print aesthetic has long generated its own image culture. Both wax and fancy prints give material and visual form to the changing cultural norms and values that have shaped urban life in colonial and postcolonial West Africa.

In Atsoupi’s eagerness to be seen in her outfit at such an important, life-changing, and value-creating event, she chose not just any tsigan but a classic wax hollandais (a Dutch wax print) design, albeit in an unusual color combination. The following day, I accompanied her to the tailor. Fabric and fashion magazine clippings in hand, Atsoupi consulted with a seamstress to design the unique look she hoped to create. The making of Atsoupi’s garment was a complex affair and required several consultation visits before the tailor cut the material. Atsoupi was both excited and anxious. She had invested most of her monthly salary in this project and cautioned that, “Once it’s cut, it’s cut!” After the initial construction of the garment, several fine-tuned alterations were necessary to adjust the length of the maxiskirt, the sophisticated hemline, and the flared gores as well as the fit of the elaborately embroidered bodice. Finally, after multiple visits, Atsoupi was happy with the results.

The night before the big event, Atsoupi carefully rehearsed her look. She experimented with different accessories and evaluated the fit of the dress on her body. Several girlfriends had come over to assist her. They commented on the beauty of the outfit while they made suggestions on how to present it. As one of her friends explained, “It’s not enough to just have a stellar garment. You have to accessorize it with the right high heels, the right purse, the right jewelry, the right perfume, the right hairdo, and you have to make it come alive!” A woman animates pagne and brings it into being, and it does the same for her.

Atsoupi chose the fabric for her outfit based on its eye-catching pattern and vibrant colors in addition to its value as a heritage design. While she counted on her pattern selection to elicit public recognition as a symbol of heritage and sophistication, she expected the materiality and visuality of the cloth to work for her in multiple ways. In fact, for Atsoupi, the cloth ought to work in personalized ways. Its effect is not simply about beauty, but instead evokes pageantry by organizing strategic elements to succeed—to be visually and spatially dynamic in presence. The colors should dazzle and enhance her skin; the borrowed and bought accessories should convey her sartorial power to perfection; she should walk in a certain way to alter the space. In this manner Atsoupi can control the way the room looks at her, and she knows, by anticipating the heritage pattern’s effect, what they see.

Pagne, like the one Atsoupi chose for the wedding, is invested with a materiality that acts independently of human intentions, but whose potentiality only becomes fully realized in action. Such a notion of material agency requires moving away from a pure semiotic understanding of clothes as signs representing people to an understanding whereby signs/clothes have a material agency that is integral to the clothed person (Keane 2005; Miller 2010). In other words, sartorial and social successes are semiotically bound up in the social successes and failures of the (public) person.

In Togo, pagne is at once perceived as traditional and modern, classic and cutting edge. Pagne can be tailored into stylish garments, or it can be wrapped and knotted around the body. It is a material that is appreciated sensually, but which simultaneously conveys coded messages. It is vibrant matter with material agency, and yet it is manipulated by its wearer and brought to life by the body. It is an ordinary object that patterns women’s everyday interactions inside the home, features at the heart of many urban living arrangements (“cours communes”), is used at work in the market, on the streets of Lomé, and on the public stages that kin-related life cycle events provide. While men also wear tailored pagne, especially shirts, women’s investments in pagne’s material and visual infrastructure are of an entirely different kind. If pagne is part of women’s moveable wealth, it is also part of women’s social and aesthetic projects. This chapter is an exploration into the types of (embodied) knowledge that combine in the social space of pagne.

Women like Atsoupi make choices that are common to brand-conscious fashionistas around the world, and they play seriously when it comes to commanding attention and claiming a place in public life, for it is women, not men, who are looked at and assessed for their public performance. Wrapping the self in cloth is one way to manifest the mutual constitution of body and cloth, where the combined agency and corporeality of the woman and the pagne work together to create a social skin (Turner 1980). The act of wearing pagne both dresses a woman’s subjectivity and extends and locates her self in specific social and urban spaces.

Yet this project of fashion can fail. Carla Jones (2010) has described how Indonesian middle class Muslim women “materialize piety” by normalizing Islamic fashion, yet their individual expressions of sartorial complexity can lead to social embarrassment if they are deemed less than tasteful. In urban Togo, the successful tailoring of individual style and a social skin—a process requiring cultural expertise, savvy, and knowledge of the cloth’s material properties—is contingent upon a larger politics of reputation and recognition that hinges on the value of public appearance. Presenting the self in public is a performative and embodied act that is carefully crafted for the critical gaze of different social groups, including elders. Thus, successfully claiming a place in society requires controlling these gazes through a complex corporeal aesthetic and practice that involves animating cloth so that it enlarges the woman—makes her a grande personne, simultaneously big, established, and impressive—while also conforming her to gendered expectations of appropriate femininity.

Normative ideas about gender and a woman’s worth are dominant cultural representations through which Togolese interpret women’s fashions. In this way, a grande personne (an established person) is said to have arrived in society. Her respectable sartorial display both situates and highlights her social status. Reputation attached to a particular form of respectable femininity hinges on social constructions of success, maturity, and financial well-being. This distinctly feminine project takes place in an urban context where men tend to wear tailored pagne shirts mostly during leisure time or more formally during ceremonial functions while women like Atsoupi bet on creating spectacular and singular bodily performances with their pagne. And so it is women, not men, who are at the center of social spaces during the kin-related life-cycle events such as weddings, baptisms, and funerals that regularly take place in Lomé’s many neighborhoods. These events are critical sites of public visibility and form a culture of display and performance where urban kinship networks coalesce. They offer a “stage presence” (de Boeck 2012) for women to present their public selves through conspicuous displays of clothing and how their body interacts with it.

In fact, there is a long gendered history in Togo of presenting the body in public and for women visually claiming a place in public space. While men adopted Western-style clothing during much of the colonial period, women built themselves through the material and visual possibilities of pagne. Much as it does today, in colonial Lomé, viewership and talk about dress informed and shaped consumerist desire and tactics for style and distinction as well as people’s ambitions to claim membership in newly emerging “communities of taste” (Martin 1995, 2). The city was a crucial site for acquiring knowledge about clothing styles, and, as elsewhere on the continent, clothing became “the most readily available practice for popular expressions of African aspirations” (Hansen 2000, 52).1 Increased access to sewing machines enabled new interpretations of European tailoring techniques and style (see Mustafa 1998a; Gott 2010; Rabine 2002; Sylvanus 2013b). Wax cloth’s material qualities—its solid cotton texture, colorfastness, and rich visuality—made it especially suitable for experimenting with form and style, giving custom-made expression to women’s sartorial self-making. The tailoring of new garments ranged from fashionable urban adaptations of the missionary-influenced turn-of-the-century hip-length blouse (marinière) to the fitted, hip-flounced taille-basse (camisole) style that is worn with a tailored skirt and reminiscent of Dior’s postwar New Look. After independence in 1960, these hybrid styles were being reinterpreted anew along with the rapid succession of new wax-print patterns featuring iconic symbols of modernity (cars and buses, and later cell phones and computers) and abstract designs in an urban context that provided the body with a new public stage to make its mark. With eyes to see and behold, the aspiration to make a memorable sartorial impression remains key today, as demonstrated by Atsoupi’s hyperawareness of the stakes of her investments in everyday visual economies and spectacular life-cycle events.

Indeed, the kind of appearance Atsoupi wished to make at the wedding required not only hard work and expertise to create but a significant financial investment. Atsoupi’s ability to present herself as simultaneously fashionable and respectably elegant depended heavily on her choice of pagne and its twofold value. The value of the self-image she hoped to create was produced both by the garment and the style competence required to pull off a distinctive look. In a regional context where presenting the body and identifying through material possession have long mattered, Atsoupi’s contemporary choice points to what happens at the critical intersection of the surface of the body and the material surface of cloth.

A deep analysis of the role of the dressed body and the material infrastructure of pagne in performative acts of self-display and public making is critical for understanding women’s historical and ongoing investment in wax cloth. This chapter charts the expertly assembled codes of sensuous materiality in the individual dress projects of Togolese women. When a woman effectively uses corporeal technique to animate pagne, she can extend cloth’s affectively charged quality to shine, enchant, and speak while taming its power to restrict—or worse, betray—her. The stories that make up this chapter illustrate how women and cloth mutually empower each other. But it also necessarily takes into account how sartorial elitism in urban Togo is produced in tension with forms of sartorial populism that are organized around the possibilities and limitations of pagne’s visual and material qualities. Illustrating the enchantments that come with dressing right, the chapter highlights the centrality of bodily technique as a key mode for women to imprint and claim their place in society. This intimate, enduring relationship between pagne and women’s self-fashioning underpins the story of this book.

Techniques of the (Dressed) Body

Women like Atsoupi become powerful agents of a pattern’s magic when they design outfits with tailors, when they shape and accessorize them, and ultimately when they animate and embody cloth. Yet creating and managing the powerful effect emanating from the combined agency of body and cloth requires bodily technique—what Marcel Mauss (1973) famously called “techniques of the body.” For Mauss, such corporeal techniques are informed by specific societal rules and habits learned through pedagogy and imitation, implying both the institutional or traditional passing on of (gendered) bodily attitudes and the unconscious appropriation of ways of moving and being. Mauss speaks of the “habitus of the body” when describing how the body is straight “while walking, breathing . . . swinging the fists [and] the elbows” (70). Similarly, techniques of wearing, walking in, and managing pagne require not just cloth and style expertise but corporeal proficiency. This form of corporeality and bodily “infrastructure”—which Filip de Boeck (2012), in his work on Kinshasa urbanities, describes as building the body into perfection—involves knowing when and how to sensuously roll the buttock or when and how to slow down to create a memorable impression. Building bodily technique, gesture, and corporeal efficacy takes work, practice, and expertise. Rather than drawing on theories of performativity and embodiment, this chapter analyzes practices of dress consumption and sartorial efficacy through the lens of bodily technique.

“Good” pagne, women frequently explained, moves with and on the body. Indeed, on the dressed body, pagne develops an aesthetic of movement through which both cloth and body become entangled and appear in mutual ascendance. The power of forms and colors achieves visibility and efficacy as women expertly shape their figures to fit the cloth; cloth must flow with the body to enhance its elegance and gravitas while simultaneously extending the capacity of the person. Per Atsoupi’s analogy, like catching the sunlight, the cloth must be capable of catching and attracting the gazes of others, thereby enhancing the visibility of the wearer.2 Good pagne thus retains a kind of magic over its audience. This special form of radiation enlarges the person, a phenomenon described by Georg Simmel (1950) in his work on secrecy and adornment. Atsoupi’s enlarged visibility creates a particular form of public presence and power.

Yet pagne can also be stubborn. Cloth that is too stiff, too smooth, or does not move accurately has the power to defy a woman’s bodily techniques and thus, by extension, can undermine her public appearance. Much like a sari, whose experiential and material qualities Mukulika Banerjee and Daniel Miller (2008) describe as being imbued with the powerful yet treacherous capacity to “[turn] a woman into a person” and to “betray” and deceive her “when neglected,” the “prosthetic” quality of pagne embedded in the cloth’s texture is diminished when it is not properly wielded. Banerjee and Miller use the notion of the prosthetic to describe the versatile domestic work of the pallu, the piece of the sari that falls over a woman’s shoulder down to her waist. The cloth, they argue, becomes an extension of the person when used to wipe a baby’s tears, handle a hot pot, or perform other tasks. Its tactility requires mastery and maintenance, and is an embodiment of the woman’s care, modesty, and style.

Pagne, like the pallu, requires embodied technique to enable its prosthetic quality. Women in Togo must properly manage pagne, which can involve wrapping or combining tailored and untailored pieces to form a full outfit. In particular, the “third piece”—essentially an unconstructed two-yard section of cloth necessary to make a full (complet) of six yards—is reminiscent of the work of pallu. This piece is either wrapped or folded at the waistline to emphasize the body’s midsection as a sign of a woman’s well-being, an example of which we see in figure 1.1. Women frequently readjust its fold or change its position. This piece can also be tied into stylish headgear; “folded like a handbag,” as a seamstress remarked; worn as a scarf; or folded over the shoulder in a chiefly style (Sylvanus 2013b). When a woman uses pagne in the latter form to mark her social standing, it cannot slip off her shoulder or, worse, glide to the floor when walking too hastily—a faux pas and lack of “clothing competence” (Hansen 2013, 3) that prompts criticism and mockery. In fact, women who do not walk properly in pagne are sometimes mocked as “lame ducks,” a comparison that elicits both laughter and ridicule. Finally, in the charged context of communal living arrangements, where co-wives sometimes inhabit the same courtyard space, women ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Patterns in Circulation
• 1  Fashioning the Body: Dressing the Public Self
• 2  Archival Prints: Alternate Histories of Taste and Circulation
• 3  Branding Cloth, Branding Nation: The Nana Benz and the Materiality of Power
• 4  Flexible Patterns: The Nanettes Remake the Market and Cloth in China
• 5  Dangerous Copies: Old Value Systems in a New Economy
• Conclusion: Assigamé Burning
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates