Refashioning Difference: Costume and the Materiality of African and Afro-diasporan Cinemas
Feminist film scholarship has rehabilitated costume by correcting the view that it is a frivolous, feminized element of filmmaking, arguing instead that dress establishes historical and geographic context. Despite these interventions, little research has explored costume from non- Western cinemas, nor have scholars addressed how both the intersections of gender and race have influenced the ‘fashioning’ of onscreen subjectivities. These are not irrelevant considerations, given the historical link between the expansion of Western textile production and the extraction of resources from formerly colonised territories, particularly the African continent, which remains an attractive destination for cheap, often female manufacturing labour. My doctoral thesis brings these geopolitical and feminist concerns into interdisciplinary conversation with film studies, by taking up the complex imbrications of clothing, race and gender, and considering the unexamined possibilities that material culture presents for African postcolonial cinematic authorship. Comprised of analyses of the work of female filmmakers Claire Denis, Julie Dash, Wanuri Kahiu and Zina Saro-Wiwa, I argue that their richly haptic, textillic works highlight the filmic image as a materially ‘fashioned’ medium, through which African/Afro-diasporan peoples’ entanglements with globalized (neo)coloniality have been sensually remediated for the screen. Combatting the marginalization of African women in cinema studies, as well as the broader devaluation of women’s aesthetic practices, I demonstrate that the neglected cultural contributions of African/Afro-diasporic female filmmakers should be reconsidered, with an eye turned towards the highly politically expressive field of dress and its material cultures.
African arts, African cinema, Afro-diasporan arts, Claire Denis, costume, fashion, film studies, Gender, Julie Dash, material culture, Race, textiles, video art, visual culture, Wanuri Kahiu, Zina Saro-Wiwa
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