Transdisciplinary Efforts to Redress Fashion and the Legacies of Mission

Abstract (English)

How to undo, rewrite and redress histories of Christian mission and its impact on fashion in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean? How does the (his/her/their)story change when we do not start our investigation with the missionaries and other colonizers but with the women and children who appropriated new forms of dress or resisted pressures to alter their sartorial styles and, related to this, radically different ideas of body, gender and spirituality? What can contemporary forms of fashion reveal about the agency of these women and past and present notions of beauty, self-care and respectability? The international and transdisciplinary gathering "Interwoven Dependencies. Redressing Fashion and the Heritage of Mission" brought together artists, designers and academics from Namibia, Ghana, Togo, Brazil, Peru, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Germany to address these questions. The aim was to create a space where everyone felt comfortable to express themselves and truly learn from each other’s ways of knowing, feeling-thinking and doing. This meant that we went beyond a mere juxtaposition of academic papers and artist talks, but started co-creating knowledge. Weaving together, sewing, making jewellery – these practices resonated deeply with the (his/her/their)stories that had been sensitively traced and reconstructed from visual, written and embodied archives – and that gave us a deeper understanding of what embodied knowledge might actually mean. In this paper, I will reflect on the resonances that developed between scholars from anthropology, history, art history, literary studies, gender studies, fashion studies, and heritage studies and artists working with performance, textiles, weaving, printing, and mixed-media. I will also discuss the ways in which this transdisciplinary approach to histories of missionisation and colonisation in Southern and West Africa and of enslavement, indenture and freedom in Latin America and the Caribbean created unforeseen connections and analytical insights. Finally, I will argue that such a transdisciplinary approach might invigorate decolonial practices in anthropology.