African Textiles, Fashionable Textiles: A Historiography

I did not go looking for textiles, they came looking for me. I originally went to southern Madagascar in the late 1980s with the intention of studying funerary monuments, which from the nineteenth century had become ever more visible and elaborate. But in the village that graciously hosted me, women soon drew me into helping them card and spin cotton, which the neighboring village then dyed and wove into burial cloth. It became apparent that as much— or more—energy, artistry, and money went into weaving and shrouds than into tombs. Yet, when I proposed the dissertation topic of handweaving to my supervisor, a French archaeologist, he was aghast. Why this frivolous topic? He, like many others, would continually try to steer me to Malagasy funerary monuments, made by specialists—by men—of stone or carved wood. A microcosm of early African art history—with its notorious preference for sculpture—perhaps compounded by the fact...