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Indigo: In Search of the Color That Seduced the World, by Catherine E. McKinley
Free Download Indigo: In Search of the Color That Seduced the World, by Catherine E. McKinley
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Review
“Gorgeously recounts McKinley's journey to West Africa's teeming markets and churning factories, through funerals and uprisings, to find ‘the bluest of the blues'†―Los Angeles Times“[McKinley's] discoveries resonate, and her unique experiences provide a vivid snapshot of the cultures she encountered in Africa.†―Washington Post“An eye-opening account of the controversial role this gorgeous, coveted pigment has played through the millennia.†―Elle
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About the Author
Catherine E. McKinley is the author of The Book of Sarahs. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, where she has taught creative nonfiction, and a former Fulbright Scholar in Ghana, West Africa. She lives in New York City.
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Product details
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (June 12, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1608195880
ISBN-13: 978-1608195886
Product Dimensions:
6 x 0.7 x 8.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.4 out of 5 stars
73 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#747,677 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
I truly enjoyed this book, for it has a plethora of information on the textile industry mainly focusing on Indigo! The author details her interesting journey on looking for authentic indigo fabric and the new people she meets as she seeks this majestic dye and talks to textile traders. It also gives you a glimpse into the West Africa Markets and culture. Such an interesting read!
Unfortunately, Catherine McKinley’s “Indigo†is another one of those books that could go grossly overlooked because it’s informative. Truly her search for indigo revealed the severe tie between cloth and world history everywhere.A reader will get much more than the story of indigo in the world of textiles. In this narrative ethnography, full of desire and color, the reader will be introduced to the Nigerian medical doctor who discovers a cure for AIDS but then just a few pages later the reader gets folded back into cloth while learning that the Netherlands was the fourth-largest, slave-trading nation whose Dutch textiles made up 57 percent of the goods exchanged for human lives during their slave trade. Cloth constituted more than 50 percent of European exports to West Africa on a whole by the late 1600s—so that we see the incredible importance of cloth to West Africans that they would exchange lives for it. Concurrently, abolitionists over in America were staging boycotts of indigo and all of this information goes very well towards feeding the reader with the zeitgeist of the times.Cloth takes on its own persona in "Indigo." McKinley makes cloth come alive as she explores its processes and its history in pre-colonial Africa as well. She effectively runs through the various types of cloth that were exchanged from East to West and North to South. Everyone around the world loved cloth in all its colors and textures. She also succinctly points out on a general note that the making of the ‘beauty’ during colonialism is also the making of the crisis that consumed many West African countries post-colonialism.Every bit of indigo McKinley can find not only furthers her Fulbright research but furthers her insatiable desire to 'feel' the history of the people when it is not readily communicable from its owners. She believes in understanding by osmosis so that when she lacks the information to steer her in the right direction for more culture, rather than assuming there is no more knowledge to be gotten, her self-determination, sheer faith, and belief in the power of cloth pushes her straight through to the places she needs to go and the people she needs to meet over and over again throughout her West African journey.The textile cultures McKinley discovers have been in West Africa for a very long time and as the needs of a global economy loom, she explains how that has necessitated that many West Africans start to place the pursuit of financial gain over the maintenance of laborious yet ancient and rare textile traditions. These cloth traditions do more than impart beauty but also translate generational heritage as indigo has been included in dowries passed down from mother to daughter and the symbolism embedded in the cloth itself expresses the various cultural values from ethnicity to ethnicity and country to country that she explores.
This book explores indigo-dyed cloth as an object with historical, cultural and aesthetic meanings ranging from its valences in ancient Dahomey to its importance as an object of the transatlantic slave trade to the personal meanings ascribed to it by the author, whose aesthetic passion motivates both her research and her thrilling travel memoir. I have not yet visited Africa, but the book recreated it for me: the colorful swirl and buzz of its marketplaces, the difficulty and joy of travel and daily life there, the amazing warmth and vibrancy of its ancient cultures: Yoruba, Ewe, Dahomeyan, to name only a few of those depicted in the book. What I found particularly transporting were the characters, especially the wise and witty Eurama, and the masterful way in which McKinley weaves elements of her personal story with facts about indigo. The way the book shows the richness and complexity of Africa is mindful of the work of the Nigerian writer Ben Okri, but the vivid clarity of the writing recalls the work of the celebrated Zora Neale Hurston. A hybrid of memoir, travelogue, and historical and cultural research, this unique book explores and challenges boundaries; it is a MUST READ for anybody curious about the complexity and uncanniness of global history and aesthetics!
A friend recommended this book to me. The mixed reviews on Amazon prepared me for a very individual and ideosyncratic approach. It's not so much about indigo but more about the social interaction through the ages with this dye source. I enjoyed the book very much. I would recommend it to people who like books in which the author is closely engaged with the subject. Our knowledge of her journey about the uses of indigo increases as we progress through the book!
Conventional wisdom says, never judge a book by its cover. Not so with Indigo. The lush dye-pot indigo blue of the outside cover and the detailed designs on the inside cover are a fitting wrapper for an exquisitely crafted book in which multiple threads of the author's search for indigo unfold in line after line of beautiful Renaissance fonts inlaid on rich stock.An indigo lover myself, I could not put it down. Willingly, I meandered intoxicated through stories of the carefully concealed link between slavery and indigo; the rise and fall of indigo in the U.S. South; India's textile traditions; the path taken by the cloth from an artisanal ancient practice of dyeing handed down through generations to an industrialized synthetic-based production by the behemoth Vlisco, adulterated even further by China's growing grip on the African textile industry; African burial practices; African proverbs and world views; culture clash when Africa meets the West; women as financial powerhouses (read, Mama Benzs)and a the West Africa of old juxtaposed with statehoods teething pains of the early 21st century. Not lost in this rivetingly woven canvas is the author's own journey from New Englander and big city New Yorker to Africa where she functions as part obruni, shop girl, researcher, pilgrim and intrepid traveler in search of her indigo pot of gold.A collector's item, the author brings a piercing vision and skilled wordsmithing to a story whose multiple overlays could have been numbing to the casual reader attracted by the book's cover. I kept going intrigued by one of Africa's great textile traditions, as well as the sub-plot of McKinely's own search for self, using the cloth as metaphor.
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