CHOICE

In this exciting work, Spring (British Museum), an active artist and curator of the British Museum’s African galleries, draws from that institution’s collections to present African textile expression “as a cyclical phenomenon in which past, present, and future are inextricably intertwined.”  Across the continent’s many cultures, the author traces themes of communication, systems of belief, trade, and cultural exchange, national identity, power and status, empowerment, and the historical groundings of contemporary art through the “dynamic and fluid medium” of cloth.  The result is a model of simultaneously syncretic and expansive scholarship: fresh, stimulating, solidly documented, and gorgeously illustrated.  An important intellectual complement to such traditionally organized surveys as John Gillow’s excellent African Textiles (2003), the present work also provides conceptual support for more specialized monographs that focus on specific African textile forms in a global context (e.g., Doran Ross’s Wrapped in Pride:  Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity, 1998).  Written with clarity, passion, and deep subject knowledge, this feat of engaged curation dispels any dusty misconceptions about the nature of museum work today.  Summing Up: Highly recommended.  Especially for African studies or museum studies programs; lower-division undergraduates and above, and general readers. –K.S. Edwards, Clemson University