Textile Ascendancies: Aesthetics, Production, and Trade in Northern Nigeria

Description

Until this century, Northern Nigeria was a major center of textile production and trade. Textile Ascendancies: Aesthetics, Production, and Trade in Northern Nigeria examines this dramatic change in textile aesthetics, technologies, and social values in order to explain the extraordinary shift in textile demand, production, and trade. Textile Ascendancies provides information for the study of the demise of textile manufacturing outside Nigeria. The book also suggests the conundrum considered by George Orwell concerning the benefits and disadvantages of “mechanical progress,” and digital progress, for human existence. While textile mill workers in northern Nigeria were proud to participate in the mechanization of weaving, the “tendency for the mechanization of the world” represented by more efficient looms and printing equipment in China has contributed to the closing of Nigerian mills and unemployment. Textile Ascendancies will appeal toanthropologists for its analyses of social identity as well as how the ethnic identity of consumers influences continued handwoven textile production. The consideration of aesthetics and fashionable dress will appeal to specialists in textiles and clothing. It will be useful to economic historians for the comparative analysis of textile manufacturing decline in the 21st century. It will also be of interest to those thinking about global futures, about digitalization, and how new ways of making cloth and clothing may provide both employment and environmentally sound production practices. Contents Acknowledgments Preface Introduction by Elisha Renne and Salihu Maiwada Chapter 1: The Social Context of Precolonial Northern Nigerian Handwoven Textiles by Elisha Renne Chapter 2: Textile Manufacturing, Printing, and Trade during Colonial Rule by Elisha Renne Chapter 3: Declining Supply and Continued Demand for Handwoven Textiles, Kano State by Salihu Maiwada Chapter 4: Kaduna Textile Industry, Trade, and the Coming of Chinese Textiles by Mohammadu Yahaya Waziri, Salihu Maiwada, and Elisha Renne Chapter 5: The Kano Textile Industry and Trade during the Independence Era by Abdulkarim Umar DanAsabe Chapter 6: Chinese Printed Textiles and Traders in Kantin Kwari Market, Kano by Hannatu Hassan Chapter 7: Nigerian-Chinese Connections and Digital Textile Designs in the Twenty-First Century by Dakyes Samaila Usman Chapter 8: Textiles, Fashion, and Time by Salihu Maiwada and Elisha Renne Epilogue by Elisha Renne and Salihu Maiwada Appendix Contributors Index