Leslie W. Rabine’s The Global Circulation of African Fashion examines the shifting markets for and meanings of African and African-style textiles and dress across three diverse sites—Dakar, Nairobi, and Los Angeles. Rabine weaves through these case studies an exploration of the diverse notions of authenticity that are projected onto clothing and its consumers. She also provides valuable insights into the livelihoods of urban African artists and merchants in the face of economic globalization.

Rabine’s eminently readable voice and her light-handed integration of the theoretical frames that elucidate her subjects are among the book’s strengths. She brings people and their stories to the fore without assigning them to neatly ordered positions in networks of global exchange—these artists, merchants, and consumers have complex attitudes toward authenticity and the markets that demand it. They adapt their work to local as well as global expectations in a struggle to succeed or, in some cases, to simply survive. Rabine describes her research experience as immersion “in the contradictory narrative that unfolded before me” (p. 170). She acknowledges the complicated nature of her own position, describing the ethical dilemmas she faced as she became enmeshed in the complexities of personal relationships and economic exchange.

Documenting the shifting forms and fortunes of textiles and garments that are marketed as “traditional,” “authentic” African products, Rabine elucidates the ways in which objects associated with “traditional” culture may emerge out of surprising histories, identities, and motivations. The book is a model of multisited ethnography, drawing together diverse contexts to illuminate global systems of objects, meanings, and ever changing traditions. Rabine’s project also traverses methodological borders, using semiotic analysis to trace the mobile referents of key terms and design elements, ethnographic fieldwork, stylistic analysis of textiles and garments, and textual analysis of reports produced by multinational entities. Thirty black and white photographs of artists, markets, and textile provide another layer of insights into the people and places Rabine describes.

Rabine organizes her analysis into overlapping chapters, including two devoted to fashion design and textile production in Dakar, Senegal, and one focused on Nairobi’s designers, many of whom look to West Africa in their efforts to create “authentic” Kenyan styles. A fourth chapter deconstructs the efforts of transnational agencies and companies (the World Bank and JCPenney) to capitalize on consumer interest in “authentic” African products. Rabine is, understandably, critical of the callous, productivity-obsessed rhetoric of multinational entities, yet one wishes their perspective had been represented by more than documents and reports; this analysis might gave been enriched by interviews with their representatives. Rabine’s final chapter offers a rich, revelatory analysis of the author’s own place in this research, describing her struggles to find an analytical framework to contain globalized markets and identities even as she finds herself drawn into the exchanges that are her subjects.

Rabine’s chapters on the Senegalese textile industry exemplify the skill with which she teases out the complexities of tradition in contemporary cultures. In Dakar, Senegalese designers who work for an Indian-owned British company create “traditional” patterns that are derived from Indonesian batiks that were imitated in French, Dutch, and British factories to serve the African market. Meanwhile, the same designers invent patterns to be sold as distinctively African (therefore traditional and authentic) in the United States, yet that are viewed in Senegal as European or Western in style. Rabine traces the shifting forms and associations of the textiles, using interviews with designers, merchants, and consumers. She concludes that “what is ‘African’ about the fabric is not a particular image of authenticity imprinted on the cloth, frozen in time and confined in space. It is rather a mobile social history and an open geography that produce the cloth” (p. 138).

By elucidating the economic and political location of SOTIBA, Senegal’s leading textile manufacturer, Rabine explores the impact of international business and financing on the ability of African designers and manufacturers to control an “authentic” African product. Founded under the French colonial government, the company was so heavily subsidized by the French that it undersold all competing sources of textiles, driving Senegalese merchants out of the market and creating a captive audience for its products. After independence, the firm was sold and resold to multinational entities, none of whom invested in its infrastructure although the black market in textiles increased to supply consumer demand. SOTIBA’s fortunes encapsulate, on a large scale, the circumstances faced by the many designers, tailors, cloth dyers, and merchants—African and African American—who seek to compete and to represent their own cultural identities through clothing and textiles.