Fray: Art and Textile Politics, by Julia Bryan-Wilson

Abstract

Chapter 3 discusses a social category whose members might be viewed as the main protagonists of wax print’s eventful Togolese story: the Nana Benz. These successful cloth merchants are renowned for their wealth, marked by their extravagant dress styles and the eponymous reference to their prestigious cars. Sylvanus describes how these women navigated relationships with European manufacturers and brokers, the changing political climates in Togo, and the stiff competition from their compatriots as well as global market forces. They “worked cloth” (using the local turn of phrase) through their access to cloth, credit, and market information, and they gained extraordinary popularity through their association with traditional culture. Sylvanus relates how the Nana Benz acquired power and influence, even as they were simultaneously drawn into relations of dependence on the national government. Successive presidents made use of this distinctively female image of power to enhance their own images, most notably during the long dictatorial regime of Gnassingbé Eyadéma. This despotic ruler understood the currency of wax print and its merchants, facilitating the transformation of the Nana Benz into national symbols, until he came to view them as a threat and wielded state power against them. With the turn of the millennium, wax print slipped from the control of its former custodians, the Nana Benz and their European sources, as global economic changes transformed manufacturing and intensified the speed with which markets operated. In chapter 4, Sylvanus addresses the fall of the Nana Benz and the rise of the Nanette, a more flexible, mobile, and precarious incarnation of the cloth-based female entrepreneur. Through profiles of women who failed to keep pace with the accelerated economy of new Asian producers, design piracy, and high-risk financing, Sylvanus traces the transformation of a nation whose identity was partially rooted in the image of the Nana Benz and the competitive yet rational market. She also tells the stories of successful entrepreneurs who make deals with factories in China and India to produce designs that are copies of copies, creating new categories of “authentic” wax print that upend long-standing dress systems. Suddenly, women lost confidence in cloth, and they could no longer rely on past evaluations of dress as a marker of status. Through wax print, Sylvanus recounts a “crisis in signification in the everyday realities of Togolese consumers” (p. 142). Her descriptions of “anxieties over what is real and what is fake” (p. 142) brilliantly evoke a familiar feeling that has crept across markets and geographies. Patterns in Circulation reveals wax print as a stand-in for capitalist modernity in the twenty-first century built on multinational production and financing, invested with local, highly personal meanings, and always teetering on the edge of unruly transformation.