THE ANTI-LIBRARY

African textiles first grabbed my interest in the early 00’s when I was living in Accra. This was prior to the widespread popularity of wax print fashion or Yinka Shonibare; a time when there was barely a dribble of information on the history of African clothing on the internet or at the New York public library. There had been a flare of publishing on the subject which extinguished in the late 70’s so the books and journals were out of print and often difficult to find, and thesis papers from the same era hadn’t been digitized. As a last resort I started compiling my own library (a rather grandiose term for a plywood bookcase taking up most of the apartment) and using my spare time to read, scour bibliographies, and track down more research materials on repeat for 10+ years.

Eventually I started picking up on strange patterns and inconsistencies in the research material as a whole.  I couldn’t figure out why some countries were over-emphasized in the literature while others were missing. I was confused when some tribes received a great deal of attention yet neighboring tribes in the same country were being ignored. I wondered why so many clothing styles of the past I’d personally encountered weren’t showing up in the history books or museum exhibits as if they never existed. These types of questions kept popping in my mind - they puzzled me, aggravated me, and finally motivated me to develop my own theories to explain these nonsensical contortions of African clothing history since no one else seemed to have answers.

I’m not “authorized” to speak on this subject since I don’t have relevant academic qualifications and I’m not African (I’m not entirely sure why that last part is germane but want to be upfront in case somebody thinks it is) but I don’t really care. This project is my laboratory for noticing and investigating the gaslighting of history which I believe is taking place as a repercussion of colonialism.

I try use images judiciously and only include examples that visually communicate something which couldn’t be expressed otherwise or are particularly hard to find because the subject matter has been marginalized (for commonplace images please refer to the history books). I’m attempting to use this project as an ad-hoc collection of materials withheld from official information banks: an anti-library of sorts.

Nat Goldberg