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Sapologie: Performing Postcolonial Identity in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Jorgensen, Kaja Erika (2014) Sapologie: Performing Postcolonial Identity in the Democratic Republic of Congo. [MRP]

Item Type: MRP
Creators: Jorgensen, Kaja Erika
Abstract:

As open-market policies reinforce global power imbalances, postcolonial subjects in Africa often find themselves dislocated from the promises of modernity that accompanied independence movements. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the transnational movement la Sape appropriates fashions from the metropole centres of Europe and re-enacts them in Africa, using the body as a representative surface through which to negotiate socio-economic adversity. This paper analyzes la Sape in terms of its relationship to dandyism, the gendering of performativity, and the ongoing search for an ‘authentic’ national identity in postcolonial Congo in order to explore the complex visual phenomena
it evokes. In so doing, the paper demonstrates how la Sape is more than a subversive and/or passive appropriation of fashion, but rather a means by which fashion is mobilized as a tool for decolonization to produce alternate identities that resist categorization.

Date: April 2014
Uncontrolled Keywords: global power imbalance, postcolonial, Africa, modernity, independence movement,Democratic Republic of Congo, fashion, socio-economic adversity, national identity, decolonization
Divisions: Graduate Studies > Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Art Histories
Date Deposited: 17 Dec 2014 20:46
Last Modified: 21 Dec 2021 00:45
URI: https://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/174

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