In Peri Klemm's Dressing Modern Like Our Mothers: Dress, Identity, and Cultural Praxis in Oromia (2022), clothing and dress are (re)understood and analyzed both as an expression of Oromo Indigenous arts, and as an element of Indigenous liberation struggles. Focusing on the Oromo people living in Eastern Ethiopia, the text details the changing presentation and meanings of Oromo dress and body decoration in concurrence with changes to the sociopolitical context of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. Dressing Modern has two main sections: the first part describes how politics and governing strategies are reflected in and adapted within aesthetic practice, and the second looks more specifically at Oromo dress and decoration within distinct localities and moments. Over the course of the text, adornment and decoration are discussed across a temporal scope that stretches from precolonial Indigeneity, the imperial engagements of Egypt and Abyssinia during the 1800s and into the nineteenth...
Dressing Modern Like Our Mothers: Dress, Identity, and Cultural Praxis in Oromia by Peri M. Klemm Unavailable
Madeline J. Bass is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, part of the Minerva Fast Track Group “Migration, Identity, and Blackness in Europe.” She has been working with Oromo communities in Oromia and the diaspora since 2014. She is currently developing an archive project with the Oromo Horn von Afrika Zentrum e.V in Berlin, Germany. [email protected]
Madeline J. Bass is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, part of the Minerva Fast Track Group “Migration, Identity, and Blackness in Europe.” She has been working with Oromo communities in Oromia and the diaspora since 2014. She is currently developing an archive project with the Oromo Horn von Afrika Zentrum e.V in Berlin, Germany. [email protected]
Madeline J. Bass; Dressing Modern Like Our Mothers: Dress, Identity, and Cultural Praxis in Oromia by Peri M. Klemm. African Arts 2025; 58 (1): 93–94. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_r_00795
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