Fashioning Inland Communities

Yaari Felber-Seligman is an assistant professor of history at the City College of New York. They specialize in the history of early Africa, comparative world history, and gender and sexual diversity.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsNote on Names and Conventions of Presenting Linguistic EvidenceIntroduction: Popular Culture, Trade, and Community in African HistoryInterlude I. FoundationChapter 1. Popular Aesthetics: Early Fashioning of Trade and Community, ca. Sixth–Fourteenth  CenturiesInterlude II. ExpansionChapter 2. As Good as Copper: New Trade, Popular Fashion, and Regional Culture, Fourteenth–Seventeenth CenturiesChapter 3. Resource Entrepreneurs: Everyday Trading and Engaging New Networks, Fourteenth–Seventeenth CenturiesInterlude III. TurbulenceChapter 4. Refashioning Affinities: Negotiating Materiality, Hierarchy, and Transregional Style, Mid-Nineteenth to Mid-Twentieth CenturiesConclusion: Popular Culture and Legacies of ConnectivityLexical AppendixNotesBibliographyIndex

“Felber-Seligman brilliantly places the fashions, desires, and affective ties developed by men and women of the inland Ruvuma River basin region at the center of the centuries-long history of Indian Ocean trade. In Ruvuma residents’ artful hands and with Felber-Seligman’s thoughtful storytelling, foreign objects far exceed the familiar scholarly treatment of material culture from ‘elsewhere’ as prestige goods or regional currencies. Instead, Fashioning Inland Communities ask us to recognize the power of informal ties and fashion whims to transform lives, politics, and even the sorts of intercontinental processes recognized as definitive of global histories.” - Kathryn de Luna, Georgetown University