La moda africana in Europa parla un'altra lingua: il caso del kanga

This work is dedicated to kangas, a peculiar and colorful garment that is the traditional dress amongst Swahili women and East-Coast African women; it is in someway considered a symbol of the African style fashion and way of living. Yet, this printed wrap cloth is not just a garment but it constitutes a complex communicative sign, as it contains a printed inscription: by this inscription a woman dressing her kanga can send a message to the whole community (and then the message exhibits the formal structure of a proverb) or to a specific member of the community not explicitly mentioned, but easy recognizable by everybody. Yet, by dressing a message instead of pronouncing it, the woman can deny any responsibility on the message’s content, and even her intention to communicate. Once in the western world, kangas loses their communicative potentiality because they are detached from the context; kanga’s micro-system of communication becomes disrupted, as it does not belong any more to the shared knowledge of the speakers and to their pragmatic competence about the management of proverbs, insults, and other linguistic acts.