African Wax Print Textiles

摘要

Interest in African wax print textiles -also known as Dutch wax - has been revived by exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2016-2017) and the Fowler Museum at UCLA (2017). Hitherto, however, other than Nina Sylvanus' 2016 Patterns in Circulation: Cloth, Gender, and Materiality in West Africa, which discusses the rich materiality of wax prints, there have been few monographs on the topic.1 In African Wax Print Textiles (the English language edition of her 2017 French book, Wax & Co.), the anthropologist and African textiles expert Anne Grosfilley investigates the place of wax prints in African societies. By establishing a fuller definition of wax prints, she seeks to explore a centuries-old relationship between European and African culture and to consider the impact of cheap Asian counterfeits on this textile tradition.