The Post-colonial Gaze on African Womanhood. Batik Textile Art and My Conversations with: The African LookBook, by Catherine McKinley.

The African LookBook is a visual history of 100 years of African women. As the jacket cover to the books indicates, previous images of African women, particularly as captured by European explorers, “were purely anthropological – bright displays of exotica where the deeper personhood seemed tucked away.” 

Curator McKinley’s book, with an extensive collection of historical and contemporary photos, presents “images [to] tell a different story of African women: how deeply cosmopolitan and modern they are in style; how they were able to reclaim the tools of colonial oppression that threatened their selfhood and livelihood.”

I find this description very engaging, and it helps in exploring the idea of “Clothes for a New Nation” of the African Woman, in the immediate period after African independence in the 1960s.

Focusing on the everyday lives and dresses of women, The African Lookbook shows how the camera became a powerful decolonizing tool.

As McKinley narrates, African women appearing in various “uniforms” of statehood were engaged in new identity formations. She writes further that: “The new fashions were dramatic proofs of a conscious engagement with pan-African and other radical ideas in politics across the continent …”

I invite my audience to explore how batik and textile creation tell this story of the post-colonial gaze on African Womanhood.