Patterns in Circulation
Cloth, Gender, and Materiality in West Africa
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.
About the Author
Nina Sylvanus is assistant professor of anthropology at Northeastern University.
Reviews
"In this wonderfully written book, we meet fascinating Togolese women who have been – and still are – central figures in the tapestry of the transnational trade in cloth. Given her deep ethnographic and theoretical knowledge, Sylvanus is able to unpack how these able women negotiate the ever-changing and ever-dangerous crosscurrents of the global economy. In so doing, we come to understand the central importance of cloth to a comprehension of sensuous materiality. This is a book that will be deeply read and passionately debated for years to come" – Paul Stoller, author of "Yaya's Story and 2013 Anders Retizus Gold Medal Laureate"
"Highly readable, 'Patterns in Circulation' tells a story of historical twists and turns in the European and Chinese production of cloth specifically produced for West African consumers and of the rise and fall of the women in Togo who controlled the trade. Sylvanus demonstrates how printed cloths act together with the women who wear them, taking cultural ownership of a very special textile with multiple origins. With rich insights into a unique aspect of global capitalism, this book is an outstanding contribution to the study of material culture and consumption as well as a fine-grained political regional ethnography" – Karen Tranberg Hansen, author of "Salaula"
"The pagne 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"
