Oct 21
Fall Lefler Lecture - Dr. Jody Benjamin
Reading for Texture: West African History at the Intersection of Sartorial Politics and an Emerging Global Cloth Economy
How can historians of the pre-industrial world center the diverse experiences and perspectives of Africans in ways that transcend the colonial archive? What can such a shift in perspective contribute to wider understandings of West African history in a global context? This talk will explore such questions through a discussion of The Texture of Change, a book that examines historical change from Saint Louis, Senegal, to Freetown, Sierra Leone through the development of textile commerce, consumption, and dress during the 18th and 19th centuries. Indigo-dyed and printed cotton, wool, linen, and silk cloths constituted major trade items that linked African producers and consumers to exchange networks that were both regional and global. Shifting focus from the historiographic conventions of the Atlantic slave trade and its impact, this study follows the global cloth trade to account for the broad extent and multiple modes of engagement between Western Africa with Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
Speaker Bio
Jody Benjamin is a social and cultural historian of western Africa with expertise in the period between 1650 and 1850. His first book, The Texture of Change: Dress, Self-Fashioning and History in Western Africa, 1700-1850 (Ohio University Press New African History Series, 2024), is a finalist for the African Studies Association 2025 Award for the Best Book in African Studies.
From 2021-2023, Dr. Benjamin was the Principal Investigator for a Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Unarchiving Blackness” exploring archival practices in African and African Diaspora Studies. Dr. Benjamin’s work has also been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the University of California Regents, University of California Humanities Research Initiative (UCHRI), the Hellman Fellows Fund, and the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He received his PhD in African and African American Studies at Harvard University in 2016.