When most people think of archives where historians work, they imagine rooms filled with rows of boxes bulging with documents, photographs and newspapers. While these archives remain central to historians, textiles constitute another vital and important archive for historians of Africa. Each cloth, each item of clothing and the composite ways in which African men and women dress their bodies reveal important dimensions of Africa’s cultural, economic, social and political histories. Students in the Spring 2021 seminar Dress, Cloth and Identity in Africa and the Diaspora, taught by Professor Judith Byfield, spent the semester exploring the different histories that can be traced through an analysis of how textiles are produced, traded, used and worn.
