The Grapevine

“Textile Trades and Consumption in the Indian Ocean World, from Early
Times to the Present”

Indian Ocean World Centre (IOWC)
McGill University, Montreal, Canada
2-4 November 2012

Co-Organisers: Gwyn Campbell (IOWC, McGill University), Sarah Fee (Royal
Ontario Museum), and Pedro Machado (Indiana University)

This multi-disciplinary international conference aims to bring together
scholars from across the humanities and social sciences to share findings,
methodologies and theoretical perspectives on cloth’s critical role in
driving exchanges in the Indian Ocean World from early times to the present
day.

Oceans have emerged as promising intellectual frameworks for reinterpreting
past and present spatial and temporal constructs. The Indian Ocean World
(IOW) in particular has recently attracted academic attention as a space of
movement and inter-relation that transcends conventional paradigms centring
on the nation state, regional studies, and European empires. Stretching from
East Africa through the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia to China, the
IOW forms a unique macro-region where the monsoon regime of winds and
currents largely moulded production and exchange. Indeed, the IOW emerged
during the first millennium CE as arguably the first “global” economy,
defined as a sophisticated and durable system of long-distance exchange.
There is further debate as to the impact on the IOW trading structure of
Europeans from the sixteenth century, the international economy of the
nineteenth century, European colonialism and its aftermath, and modern
globalisation.

Central to these debates is the role of textiles. For centuries, cloths of
various origins, fibres, colours and patterns have been carried along coasts
and across vast distances to communities that demanded certain types in
accordance with their specific cultural, social and political universes.
Rather than take a particular fibre, ‘country’ or European company as the
unit of study, this conference aims to explore the broader cross-currents of
textile flows in the IOW. It seeks to explore, in particular, structures of
trade, distribution, demand, marketing and consumption – in all of which
finance and credit played vital roles. It also strives to understand local
consumer demand as a vital force in shaping the economic, political, social,
and artistic history in both producer and consumer communities. Emerging
from the wider scholarship of culturally inflected material histories of the
movement and exchange of commodities, the study of textile consumption and
the logics of consumer tastes, as socially and culturally embedded
processes, can offer compelling insight into how societies, communities and
people create and maintain identities through strategies of self-fashioning,
and thereby shape the world around them. Moreover, it is when studied within
the same analytical frame as the production, distribution and marketing of
textiles that consumption can contribute most profoundly to an understanding
of the dynamics of the worlds of the Indian Ocean stretching from Africa to
East Asia.

This multi-disciplinary international conference invites paper proposals
that examine any aspect of the trade, exchange and consumption of textiles in
the Indian Ocean world from early times to the present day. We particularly
welcome papers that explore networks and structures of:

– local finance and credit
– distribution and marketing
– demand and consumption

and within these the significance of (i) gender and age; and (ii) religious
practice and ideology  (including the ritual, political and social uses and
meanings attached to imported cloth)

Dates and Registration:
•  Deadline for submission of abstracts (title; 1-2 paragraphs): 30
September 2011.
• The review process will be completed by 1st November 2001.
•  Papers selected for the conference must be submitted no later than
1st September 2012.
•  The registration fee is $175 US ($75 US for students) payable by
1st September 2012.
•  The late registration fee (after 1st September 2012) is $200 US and $100
US for students

Kindly contact Sarah Fee <sarahf@rom.on.ca> or Pedro Machado
<pmachado@indiana.edu> with proposals (or with any queries).

African Music in the 21st Century – An Iconic Turn?
An International Symposium Celebrating the 21st Anniversary of the African Music Archives Mainz (AMA)
To be held at: Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany. June 13th – 16th 2012

Convenors: Hauke Dorsch, Matthias Krings

Since the advent of the 21st century and the proliferation of digital media a shift in the consumption and marketing of music in a number of African countries occurred: Videos gained an increasing importance. Today, Video-CDs and DVDs are widely sold in African cities, bars and restaurants show music clips and music casting shows on TV, music videos are available online through sites like youtube, but also via homepages and blogs devoted to artists, genres, and (at least ideally) music of the entire continent.

Due to this online availability and easy circulation of discs the visual aspects of music, especially dance styles, clothing fashions, and coiffure spread more easily and rapidly than ever before between different African countries and between African and its Diaspora. For example, migrants stay up to date with regards to musical and fashion trends in their respective countries of origin thanks to these videos. Prior to the mediatisation of African music through visual technologies, dance styles could only be transmitted through the presence of human bodies. Due to the proliferation of videos African dance and music travel trans-nationally on South-South and South-North axes at an accelerated speed.

So far, the pictorial turn (Mitchell) or iconic turn (Boehm) in Cultural Studies informed only few studies on African music. Consequently, the change following the digitisation and video-isation of the production and dissemination of African music is still under-researched. Taking music videos as its vantage point, this symposium will look at visual aspects of the performance and analysis of music more generally.

We invite young researchers and established scholars to present papers on the different ways music in Africa (and beyond) is interpreted, illustrated, translated or extended in its meaning by visual representations. These may refer to the analysis of individual videos, the comparison of a number of videos, or genres, changing trends of video aesthetics, the convergence of visual and aesthetic trends from elsewhere – in Africa and beyond (i.e. MTV, Bollywood, etc.). Furthermore, papers on the transformation (or even emergence) of music industries in Africa due to the impact of the visual are welcome. How are music videos produced on the ground? Who are the agents of the iconic turn in African music? How does music television support the iconic turn in African music? Finally, we invite papers on other aspects of the visual in music, performance (i.e. looking at costumes, stage shows, stage lighting, etc.), on festivals and of course dance.

The symposium will celebrate the African Music Archives’ 21st anniversary. The AMA hosts Germany’s largest collection of recordings of African popular music. It includes roughly 10.000 recordings, from shellac records of the 1950s, to vinyl discs and singles from the 1960s to the 1990s, to music cassettes of the 1980s and 90s, to recent CDs, VideoCDs and DVDs.

The symposium will be hosted by the African Music Archives, Department of Anthropology and African Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. It will take place on campus from June 13th to 16th. Organisers: Dr. Hauke Dorsch, Prof. Dr. Matthias Krings
Please submit your proposal no later than Sept., 15th 2011 and your full paper no later than May, 23rd 2012 to Hauke Dorsch dorschh@uni-mainz.de.