Researching the history of West Africa through the lens of material culture enriches our understanding of the complex ways in which this region has long been embedded in global history. Using West African textiles as primary historical source, as Colleen Kriger has eloquently shown, not only deepens our understanding of fashion, dress, and textile developments through time and space, but also provokes new interpretations of West African history, bringing African subjectivity to the fore (Kriger 2006; Kraamer 2023). This research on historical kente and related textile traditions in Ghana, Togo, and Côte d'Ivoire, which I began in 2022, contributes to a growing body of literature that focuses on textiles as global artifacts and as a “site for elaborating material strategies of subjectivity” (Marín-Aguilera and Hanß 2023: 21).1
Multidisciplinary approaches of heritage studies have continuously been expanded with contemporary discourses on gender, material culture, the use of...