Refashioning South-South spaces: Cloth, clothing and Kenyan cultures of economies

Globalization narratives, though ubiquitous, are increasingly confounded by Africa. As presented by a hegemonic "West," globalization has rendered Africa precipitously "behind" Asia and Latin America, with respect to its 'global' importance. Clothing - specifically garment production for export has been embraced varyingly in Kenya and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa as an antidote to this increasing marginalization. The emergence of outward processing strategies for global apparel production throughout much of Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s has provided only limited success and remains but a tenuous thread by which non-oil producing African economies are seemingly linked to global trade. Export-oriented apparel production is, however, only one of four "international clothing systems" at work in Kenya. While moving beyond the confines of export processing, this study identifies cloth and clothing as sites of transforming regional integration, reconfiguring development strategies, and as sources of multiple imaginaries of globalization. Beginning with an interrogation of "African" clothing, secondhand garments, and export apparel production, historically situated, I argue that their intersections are mutually constitutive, persistently colonial, and indicative of a level of global integration elided from normative global accounts. Attentive to the intersecting scales through which clothing is experienced - from the corporeal to state-based policies to international networks of trade. I continue with a tandem focus on clothed bodies and the creation of consumer subjectivities to explore the ways in which these international clothing systems come together in everyday life and how, in this process, the cultural and economic are intertwined. I conclude with an ethnographic approach to international trade, via a focus on Kenyans and "Dubai clothes." Within a framework of transnationalism, I explore the reimagined linkages between East Africa and Arabia through emergent networks of small-scale garment entrepreneurs. This re-orientation evidenced by Kenyans seeking economic and cultural integrations with Asia offers an alternative to Western-scripted narratives of globalization. As trade data likewise suggests, despite the rhetorical and material investments in exports to the West, Kenya's most important trading relationships are those with other African countries and with Asia. This shift signals a departure from present-colonial understandings of Africa vis-a-vis the West to increasingly compelling South-South spatialities.