Decentring Wax Print Discussions: Production, Marketing, and Consumption in West Africa
This (hybrid) Humanities Across Borders conversation session, featuring researchers and curators Adwoa Owusuaa Bobie, Malika Kraamer, and Priya Swamy, reframes wax print discussions beyond European-centric perspectives on origin and authenticity. Instead, they centre Africa's crucial role in shaping, adapting, and sustaining this fabric as a cultural and economic resource throughout West Africa and interrogate how the notions of co-creation and decentring authenticity may be addressed in the form of exhibition making.
All are welcome. You can attend online via Zoom or in person in the IIAS Conference room. Registration is required due to limited seating and to receive the Zoom link.
The Conversation
Wax print is a debated topic because of its complex origins and evolving production, marketing, and consumption. The fabric has experienced years of appropriation and adaptation across different social contexts, embodying various cultural identities from Asia to Europe and then Africa. In West Africa, it is commonly called African Print, highlighting the region’s claim to the fabric - culturally, socially, and economically.
The conversation between Adwoa Owusuaa Bobie, Malika Kraamer, and Priya Swamy focuses on the introduction, production, marketing, and use of wax print in West Africa, and how these histories may be part of exhibition narratives in museums. Rather than focusing on European perspectives that emphasise origin and production as measures of authenticity and ownership, we aim to promote a more inclusive conversation about Africa’s role in shaping and preserving wax print as both a cultural and economic asset. We highlight the indispensable role of Africa that has sustained the fabric as a cultural and economic commodity over the years. Finally, we reflect on how this indispensable role can be shown through material culture and curatorial approaches.
The Speakers
Adwoa Owusuaa Bobie is a research fellow at the Centre for Cultural and African Studies (CeCASt) at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Ghana. Her research interests lie in the Culture and Creative Industries in Ghana and Nigeria, with a focus on fashion, clothing, and textiles. Adwoa’s works highlight the creativity and innovation in contemporary fashion from Africa, fashion sustainability, and the menace of fashion waste, the entrepreneurship of fashion and clothing, and the social, political, cultural, and economic functionalities of fashion, textile, and clothing.
Malika Kraamer is an affiliated researcher at the Global Heritage Lab at the University of Bonn, Germany and teaches at the University of Leicester, UK. Specialising in critical museum, heritage and material culture studies, her work focuses on Africa and South Asia. Her research explores West African historical entanglements with the world through textiles and fashion, examining how these connections are materialised and narrated today. Her interests include local knowledge production, mission and colonialism, provenance research, and decolonial museum practices. She has published on kente cloth, West African textiles, Japanese saris and the challenges facing museums with global heritage collections.
Priya Swamy is curator, Globalisation and South Asia at Wereldmuseum. Her research has been focused on the legacies and material culture of Indian indentured labour, not only to deepen solidarities and historical understanding across various South Asian diasporas, but to understand these legacies and objects as belonging to multiple locations. Her curatorial work prioritises community-based approaches and projects that can intervene into ‘representational provenances’ (Swamy and Lewis 2021) of objects, collections, and exhibitions at Wereldmuseum. She is currently part of a team working on an exhibition about wax print patterns.
Registration (required)
You can join us online or in the IIAS Conference Room. Registration is required due to limited seating and to receive the Zoom link. Please use the web form on this page.