The City in a Shoe: redefining urban Africa through Sebago footwear consumption (original) (raw)
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Fashioning Dakar’s Urban Society: Sartorial Code-Mixing in Senegal
Sociologus: Volume 69, Issue 2, 2019
Fashion constitutes a vital part of material culture and is an expression of sociocultural and aesthetical practices in Senegal. Manifold features have shaped sartorial styles for centuries, with sartorial mastery interweaving local techniques and global trends up to today. Tied to a long history of bodily adornment and of the importance of textiles, fashionable clothing plays a crucial role in indicating status and various forms of belonging. The widely used concepts of sañse and métissage refer to the centrality of fashion in everyday life and to the cultural tendency to integrate and combine various ideas, materials and styles. In this paper, I suggest that fashion in urban contexts not only serves as a means of and for social distinction but also works as a social adhesive when analysing fashion through the prism of métissage. Hence, ‘sartorial code-mixing’ has become a decisive feature of urban fashion and, like language and music, has a role in the formation of an open-minded ...
Clothes Talk: Youth Modernities and Commodity Consumption in Dakar, Senegal
2003
CLOTHES T A LK , CLOTHES W ALK YOUTH MODERNITIES AN D C O M M O DITY CONSUMPTION IN D AKAR , SENEGAL By Suzanne Scheld Adviser: Professor Louise Lennihan Based on twelve months o f fieldwork in Dakar, Senegal and funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation, this thesis examines how in the context o f contemporary globalization, increased volumes o f luxury commodities shape the modem consciousness o f individuals in a developing African city. This project specifically examines this phenomenon through a study o f youth clothing consumption. Dakar is a consumer society with particular consumer dynamics. In addition to class, patron-clientage and kinship are central to understanding contemporary patterns o f consumption in Dakar. Clothing is a commodity that has been radically altered by urbanization and the globalization o f manufacturing processes and advertising. Clothing is also a realm o f cultural expression that has particular importance to Dakarois and it is the focus o f many urban c...
Fashioning African Cities: The Case of Johannesburg, Lagos and Douala
Streetnotes, 2012
This article examines the reciprocal relationships between African cities and their fashion. Until recently, fashion capitals in the West like Paris, London and New York were perceived as being the only leading trend-setting places for global fashion design. The fact that besides these "key urban centers" (Breward 2011) a number of fashion cities have developed in Africa, which contain the networks and necessary infrastructure destined to produce, distribute and present fashion for local and international consumers, has been neglected so far. The article addresses this neglect by comparing three case studies on fashion designers from Johannesburg, Lagos and Douala and focusing on questions about urbanity and fashion as cultural practices. The article highlights the specific local contexts and urban dynamics of these cities, which provide a constant source of inspiration to the designers considered. Every city possesses its own historical, cultural, social and political context and networks which become represented in fashion. At the same time, the article strives to understand how fashion-from production to representationpositions itself in the urban landscape reinterpreting and transforming it. The three case studies are Stoned Cherrie from Johannesburg (South Africa), Buki Akib from Lagos (Nigeria) and Jules Wokam with Too'maii from Douala (Cameroun).
Second-hand clothing commerce and the mobility cultural configuration: A journey to manhood
Second-hand clothes, advertised as brand new commodities, sold in street markets or small shops are a common landscape of contemporary Dakar. After the economic crisis that has stricken Europe since 2008, and the implementation of FRONTEX, international migration from Senegal to Europe has declined and newer forms of mobility and motility have emerged. The sale of second-hand clothing from China, Europe and the United States seems to be the main resource for some young men trying to access the economic and social space of migrants, and this is a popular outlet on the path to becoming an active member of society by gaining the social and economic status of grown men. The motility of their merchandise through transnational spaces bestows upon these young traders an aura of motility, which increases their merchandise value and their own social status, blending them into the reality of returning migrants. The objective of this article is to open up a discussion about the close link between second-hand clothing commerce, migration and the experience of manhood in contemporary Senegal, taking a cultural approach. The focus of this research is the ways in which young men use the cultural frameworks of migration in the selling of second-hand clothing in order to gain the resources and the social status of men. This article adds to the growing academic research that studies migration not only as a space–time movement, but also as a cultural configuration involving interactions between the structures, contexts and actions of those who move, those who stay and those who receive migrants.
One must arrive at night. The plane flies over the Cap-Vert peninsula 1 a first time and begins a slow turn, flirting with the dark waters of the Ocean. Dakar then appears, emerging from darkness. The city shows its "true" colors: neither the Panafrican green-yellow-red, nor the Islamic green, but an electric and fluorescent candy pink glowing from the Casino du Cap-Vert -one of Dakar's most popular nightclubs. Unavoidable source of light and color in the dark, it captures the eye of the impatient passenger. This is a rather provocative way to set the Dakar scene while some commentators are currently debating about the rise of a theologico-moralistic conservatism in Senegal. As many agree to say, Dakar by night is thereby quite widely heralded as emblematic of the yombe-life 2 -the site of the falsification of an "authentically African/Senegalese Self". Within urban Senegalese popular culture, the yombe-life is what is not "really senegalese", what drives one appart from the "true values" and deludes the "malades de la boussole" ("All magnetized West", as the french writer Erik Orsenna puts it) following the model of an "Evil imported from the West/Elsewhere" ["mal venu d'ailleurs"].
“These girls’ fashion is sick!”: An African City and the Geography of Sartorial Worldliness
This article reads the embodiment of fashion in the web series, An African City, as a geographical site for challenging dominant Eurocentric narratives about African women as insignificant to the global spaces of fashion. By situating embodied fashion as a site of analysis, the article posits that the sartorial elegance in An African city is part of the “Africa Rising” discourse, in this case announcing Africa’s cosmopolitan worldliness on and through the bodies of upper-middle class “Afropolitan” women. While this use of fashion as a counter-narrative constitutes a critical intervention by the web series, the article also argues that An African City concomitantly contributes to the production of negative discourses about poor and “non-Afropolitan” African women as unfashionable.
One must arrive at night. The plane flies over the Cap-Vert peninsula 1 a first time and begins a slow turn, flirting with the dark waters of the Ocean. Dakar then appears, emerging from darkness. The city shows its "true" colors: neither the Panafrican green-yellow-red, nor the Islamic green, but an electric and fluorescent candy pink glowing from the Casino du Cap-Vert -one of Dakar's most popular nightclubs. Unavoidable source of light and color in the dark, it captures the eye of the impatient passenger. This is a rather provocative way to set the Dakar scene while some commentators are currently debating about the rise of a theologico-moralistic conservatism in Senegal. As many agree to say, Dakar by night is thereby quite widely heralded as emblematic of the yombe-life 2 -the site of the falsification of an "authentically African/Senegalese Self". Within urban Senegalese popular culture, the yombe-life is what is not "really senegalese", what drives one appart from the "true values" and deludes the "malades de la boussole" ("All magnetized West", as the french writer Erik Orsenna puts it) following the model of an "Evil imported from the West/Elsewhere" ["mal venu d'ailleurs"].
TRANSLOCAL TRADERS AND THE CITY IN SOUTHERN AFRICA
MOBILE URBANITY. Translocal Traders and City in Southern Africa., 2018
As many translocal and cross-border traders, mukheristas cover thousands of miles every week to supply urban markets, thus feeding themselves, their families and the cities they connect. After an intensive field work travelling with mukheristas between Maputo (Mozambique) and Johannesburg (South Africa), the author shows the role of complex hybrid practices of trans-local mobility in shaping cities and territories in sub-saharan Africa. A "research on the road" to reflect on the political relevance of informal mobile practices in troubled urban societies, but also on new theoretical concepts and empirical research approaches. In a world where change is extremely rapid and new issues emerge unremittingly, 'Mobile urbanity' opens up new ways of thinking the spatial dimensions and the agency embraced in human mobility. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "In a world where change is so rapid and new issues emerge unremittingly, this book contributes to make things even more complex. The research resulting from the in-depth investigation realized along and on the 'in-between' space that the mukheristas travel from Maputo to Johannesburg and to Maputo back again to sell the goods bought in Johannesburg, adds to the multiple facets of the urban space in Africa. (...) The entrepreneurial mukheristas who make their living and even prosper by traveling between Maputo and Johannesburg are one specific feature of urbanization in Africa (exactly, the 'mobile urbanity' proposed by the author). As the book stresses urban mobility 'opens up new ways of thinking the spatial dimensions and the agency embraced in human mobility'. Recognizing the centrality of informality and the complex hybrid practices of trans-local mobility in shaping cities and territories in Africa, though, should not conceal the deep causes of inequality and the 'networked individualism' that lie behind them. In this sense, the book has the great value of opening more questions than giving responses". [From FOREWORD by Marcello Balbo]
Journal of Urban History, 2013
Marché Kermel and Marché Sandaga were established at the beginning of the twentieth century in the contemporary heart of colonial Dakar, Senegal, the capital of French West Africa (AOF). In terms of general size and building techniques—both are based on prefabricated iron—they evoke the great covered markets and similar structures erected in France and other European countries in the late nineteenth century. Yet, in matters of style, each constitutes a unique and outstanding monument in Dakar as well as in French West Africa. Relying on primary and secondary sources and on fieldwork, we would like to trace the stylistic origins of these markets, hardly known in the relevant literature, and to analyze their meaning against the background of the colonial situation in sub-Saharan Africa. Moving from a transplanted fin-de-siècle neo-Moorish toward an imagined neo-Sudanese, we bring to the fore each paradox, on the theoretical and physical levels.