White Skins/Black Masks

Low, Gail

doi:10.4324/9780203359600

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Escobar (2015) refers to this model as a “One‐World World” (p. 14), which is “largely conceived of from the perspective of the Euro‐American historical experience and exported to many world regions over the past few hundred years through colonialism, development, and globalization.” Early colonialism and the rise of industrial capitalism in the 1800s, along with the establishment of trade routes, supply, and markets by the British Empire, supported a race to Africa and a reconfiguration of geography and culture. Simultaneously, nineteenth‐century anthropology supported the production of a “taxonomy of different cultures placed on a temporary scale of development” (Ching Liang‐Low, 1996, p. 22). These conditions naturalized the “other” as a primitive living in another time and place, establishing a hierarchy of economic, social and cultural development, and geographies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Castoff from the West, pearls in Kantamanto? A critique of second‐hand clothes trade

Manieson

Ferrero-Regis

2022

J of Industrial Ecology

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African countries are today the major importers of the lowest grade of second‐hand clothing (SHC). With the opening of global markets and the intense circulation of fast fashion in the Global North from the 1990s, the trade of SHC has exploded in the twenty‐first century. The fast fashion business model, which fuels the SHC trade, has led to reduced quality of clothes, limited clothing lifetime, and accelerated discard of clothing, which end up as donations or become waste. The complexity of the international geographies of the SHC trade creates opacity and secrecy, maintaining inequalities and imbalances between Global North (GN) and South (GS), which continue a relationship of colonial dependence. This paper presents a critical look at SHC exchange in Kantamanto, the biggest SHC market in West Africa, situated within the central business district of Accra, Ghana. The paper scrutinizes the export of unwanted donated clothing, popularly known as “Obroni w'awu” (white man is dead), to Kantamanto. We use direct observation along with an interpretive research design through the analysis of photos taken from Kantamanto, and scholarly and gray literature. The paper documents local practices of reuse, exposing a duality: on the one hand, clothing's symbolic value that is lost in the GN is reconstituted in the GS through exchange and labor‐creating local economies. On the other, the global trade of SHC has become synonymous with dumping, continuing a colonialist relationship between the GN and GS whereby the GN exports unwanted clothing to predominantly African countries’ landfills.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Castoff from the West, pearls in Kantamanto? A critique of second‐hand clothes trade

Manieson

Ferrero-Regis

2022

J of Industrial Ecology

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`She'll Wake Up One of These Days and Find She's Turned into a Nigger'

Ahmed¹

1999

Theory, Culture & Society

148

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In this article, I examine racial narratives of passing and their relationship to discourses of hybridity. Rather than defining passing as inherently transgressive, or as one side of identity politics or the other, I suggest that passing must be understood in relationship to forms of social antagonism. I ask the following questions: how are differences that threaten the system recuperated? How do ambiguous or hybrid bodies get read in a way which further supports the enunciative power of those who are telling the difference? In what ways is `passing' implicated in the very discourse around tellable differences? Although to some extent all identities involve passing - insofar as the subject never `is' what it `images' itself to be - we still need to theorize the differences between passing as white and passing as black. I argue that passing as black as a white subject can function as a technique of knowledge which assumes `blackness' to be imageable and hence beable. However, for black subjects to refuse to pass as white - that is, for black subjects to pass as black - can make visible the violent histories concealed by the invisibility of the mark of passing. Such a process of passing as black subjects is tied to a politics of the collective - a coming together through the recognition of the lack that engenders passing in the first place.

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White Skins/Black Masks

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Castoff from the West, pearls in Kantamanto? A critique of second‐hand clothes trade

Castoff from the West, pearls in Kantamanto? A critique of second‐hand clothes trade

`She'll Wake Up One of These Days and Find She's Turned into a Nigger'

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