Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the cultural politics of protest dress in both Biafra and Amabazonia separatist regions of Nigeria and Cameroon to unpack the aesthetic sensibilities and identity contestations associated with the consumption of clothes that communicate defiance against repressive states.

Paper long abstract:

How is the contemporary nationalist movements in Biafra and Ambazonia separatist regions of Nigeria and Cameroon articulated and choreographed through dress? What socio-cultural and political factors are shaping the mobilization of protest fashion as a ‘weapon of the weak’ to confront and mediate the state and how is dress yielding to state repression and governmentality? This paper examines the cultural politics of protest dress in both Biafra and Amabazonia separatist regions to understand the aesthetic sensibilities, gender and identity construction and contestations. I unpack the multi-layered motivations and consequences of people’s dressing choices employed as resources for ethnic nationalism. I comparatively examine the tension animated by government’s counter-strategy to eliminate the production, consumption and circulation of protest fashion taking into account the materiality, positionality and temporality of dress as a mobile corpus of local agency of resistance amplified by social media, local nationalists and celebrities. I draw from Michel Foucault theory of power to argue that power is decentred or layered and that state repressions in both Biafra and Ambazonia regions have reordered and shifted the zone of nationalism to dress even as the politicization of dressing as an expression of protest and dissent is violently pursued through the production and consumption of clothes that communicate defiance against repressive states. Primary data like oral interviews with Biafran and Ambazonia fashion consumers and producers, celebrities, state officials and civil society advocates and secondary literatures like journals and newspaper reports. Collected data were analyzed qualitatively through the lens of fashion political statement.