The places, power, and politics of Uganda’s secondhand clothing industry

Since 1980, Uganda has experienced a 600% growth in urban population accompanied by the rapid implementation of neoliberal policy directives. Bound with and driving this dramatic urban growth, Uganda’s second hand clothing industry is a dynamic, power-laden, and hotly debated trade. In 2015, Uganda alone imported 1,261 tons of worn clothing, worth nearly seventy million dollars, with second hand garments accounting for 81% of all clothing purchases in the country. Further, as of 2016, Kampala was ranked as the fourth largest city in terms of total shopping center space within the Sub-Saharan region. With 182,000 square meters devoted to retail, it surpasses much larger cities like that of Lagos, Nigeria. Over the last fifteen years, the exponential growth of the industry has prompted significant contestation and conflict, including local, national, and international actors. This came to a head in late 2016, when the Ugandan government proposed a ban on used clothing to boost national textile production. In turn, the US is threatening to revoke Uganda’s preferential trade rates under AGOA. Underpinning these debates are questions around development, international influence, and national autonomy. Left out of these debates, however, are small-scale, entrepreneurs. Low-income women make up the majority of market vendors who are displaced by, yet innovating through, these shifting urban, political, and economic landscapes. My research takes on this work, centering the lived experiences and spatial encounters of low-income women operating in Uganda’s used clothing industry. I build on feminist and postcolonial urban Geography to analyze how these women carry out, disrupt, and navigate rapid processes of gentrification. I seek to understand macro geopolitical and geoeconomic shifts as they are enacted through often overlooked spaces of consumption: malls, markets, and informal street pop-up shops. Following Mansvelt’s call for research that takes seriously, “consumption as an arena in which governance, regulation, and citizenship are produced”, I analyze secondhand clothing markets and malls as geopolitical sites actively re-making and transforming urban space in Kampala. In doing so, I trace how these spaces act as intimate, postcolonial, gendered, and classed sites where global and national economic policies unfold.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Grantor

The University of Texas at Austin

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Whitesell, Dominica Kane

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Faria, Caroline

• East African fashion
• Feminist geography
• Feminist GIS
• Global intimate

Language dc:language.iso

en

Identifier URI

https://doi.org/10.26153/tsw/64007

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/136705