Listen to Clothes Cloth & Culture talks by Sue Jones & Michael McMillan

If you missed the event 'Saga Bwoys and Bedouin Women’on 25 September; audio recordings of the speakers are available at the bottom of this post. The photographs are of the 'conversational artefacts' chosen by the speakers. The cardigan and embroidery are now on display in the library with accompanying texts by Sue and Michael.

Michael McMillan - Garbicci cardigan or ‘yardie cardie' 

Sue Jones - embroidery by her mother

Reporting on 'Bedouin Women and Saga Bwoys' at the Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group 25th September 2014

Dr. Michael McMillan talks about his Gabicci cardigan and 'yardie' style

The Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group autumn programme got off to an inspiring start last night with presentations from Michael McMillan and Sue Jones, delivered in a conversational style that has become characteristic of our monthly textiles hub.

The evening was particularly thrilling at a personal level since parallels could be drawn between the inspiration points for my own body of research – my father’s elegance provided a catalyst for my doctoral research into the creolised aesthetic of the Empire Windrush generation and the impact of the African-Caribbean presence on English male dress; my mother’s stitching provided the creative spark for my current concern with ‘crafting difference’ and the way in which history might somehow be worked by hand, concerns which underpin the ethos of the Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group itself.

At first glance McMillan and Jones’ papers may seem somewhat unrelated. As you will hear from the podcast, through sharing ideas about cloth and memories marked by the wearing of particular clothes, the connections between the two became clearer as the evening progressed. Both spoke of the way in which clothes and cloth allow those without a voice to speak about themselves and the way in which they would like to be seen. Both spoke about cultural entanglements - for McMillan across the islands and across the Atlantic, for Jones across Jordan and England. They pinpointed cross-generational exchanges. They discussed the idea of repeating stories of rebellion and the role that the ritual of dressing plays in the struggle to be seen.

Dr. Sue Jones talking about her mother's embroidery

The richness of McMillan and Jones’ presentations reminded us of centrality of clothes and cloth to the human experience. Jones’ conversation piece, a linen tablecloth embroidered by her mother, demonstrated to us the way in which cloth becomes saturated with cultural meaning as craft techniques and family keepsakes are passed from one generation to the next. This is what motivates each of us to engage in this ongoing conversation with everyday stuff.

© Christine Checinska 26th September 2014

Clothes, Cloth and Culture Group. 25 September 2014 'Saga Bwoys and Bedouin Women’

Bani Hamida Weaving Project, Makawir Centre, Jordan. Photo: Sue Jones

Three Jamaican immigrants (left to right) John Hazel, a 21-year-old boxer, Harold Wilmot, 32, and John Richards, a 22-year-old carpenter, arriving at Tilbury on board the ex-troopship 'Empire Windrush', smartly dressed in zoot suits and trilby hats. Photo: Douglas Miller/Getty Images

Join us on Thursday 25th September 2014 at 6:30pm - 8.30pm to hear presentations by Dr Michael McMillan and Dr Sue Jones followed by an informal question and answer session. The meeting will be convened by Dr Christine Checinska, the 2nd Stuart Hall Library Animateur.

  

What the Bedouin women taught me - re-connecting with my mother's craft skills - Dr Sue Jones

I went in the opposite direction of my mother's life as a housewife and home-working seamstress - non-domestic, professional, university educated, without children and travelling around the world doing consultancies.
But my work always related to my background - concerned with poverty, income generation and women's lives and empowerment. I made a particular connection with a Bedouin women's weaving project in Jordan.
It is only by reflecting on this very long term relationship with the older Bedouin weavers and their daughters - that I can see how they helped me re-focus on my mother and her craft skills.
It leaves me with current questions to share here - about women's involvement in craft work now and how far their work can be seen and acknowledged as creative or is it just a source of income? What was it like for my mother?

Dr Sue Jones: As an anthropologist and professional urban planner, Dr Sue Jones has been involved, since the 1980s, in consultancies, lectures and writing textbooks about poverty and community projects around the world, including Africa and the Caribbean.

In 2006, she completed a 20 year longitudinal PhD thesis of Bedouin women and their weaving project in Jordan. Since 2009 she has been a Visiting Research fellow at Goldsmiths, focused on Material Culture in the contemporary context. This has included: (2011) an exhibition about the weaving project, (2013) a special Issue of the journal Textile -Materialising voices from the Middle East and (2014) a film with the Bani Hamida women. She is currently researching textile case studies around the world.

‘Saga Bwoys and Rude Bwoys': Migration, Grooming and Dandyism - Dr Michael McMillan

I have been always struck by how men of my father's generation were so well dressed in those iconic black and white documentary photographs depicting their arrival after a three-week transatlantic journey by sea. Their neatly pressed suited with and a white breast pocket handkerchief, polished brogue shoes, white starched shirt with throat straggling tie and a trilby hat cocked at an angle. In Eastern Caribbean vernacular, they were ‘Saga Bwoys' or ‘Sweet Bwoys', a masculine persona who in my rite of passage from being short pants ‘coloured' boy to a black British young man I saw as an exemplar of ‘good grooming' in his sartorial attention to detail as words for the ladies danced off his tongue like Lord Kitchener's Calypso. These ‘Lonely Londoners' would later become Jamaican ‘Rude Bwoys' swaggering as if to a Ska or Reggae beat in their two-tone mohair suits with the attitude and creole chat of the best dressed chicken on the street. In my camel Crombie coat, suede trimmed Garbicci cardigan or ‘yardie cardie', pleated Farah slacks, Bally shoes with shiny buckle stepping out like a ‘Rude Bwoy' in a ‘Causal Style' to ‘rave' at a Sound System dance. ‘Saga Bwoys' and ‘Rude Bwoys' are constituents of the contemporary ‘Raggamuffin' geneology that as subcultural black masculine practices have been self-fashioned in the rhizoid network of racial, transcultural and diaspora exchange and transfer.
Yet there has been a limited focus on how and what postwar Caribbean migrant men contributed through the material culture and performativity of the ‘Saga Bwoy' and ‘Rude Bwoy' to a diasporic understanding of black dandyism. Using Carol Tulloch's ‘style-fashion-dress' amongst other conceptual framework: this presentation will begin to explore the ontology and materiality of a process that saw the aesthetic embodiment and reconstruction of diasporic ‘Caribbeanness' in a British context of the dressed black male body; a body that would come to reconfigure the streets of urban Britain with fresh dynamic masculinities in motion.

Dr. Michael McMillan is a writer, dramatist, artist/curator and scholar of Vincentian migrant parentage whose recent play includes: a new translation of Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Sezuan (Trenchtown) (MAT tour 2010 & 2012) and curatorial work includes: My Hair: Black Hair Culture, Style & Politics (Origins of the Afro Comb, Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology 2013), I Miss My Mum's Cooking (Who More Sci-Fi Than Us, KAdE Kunsthal, Amersfoort, Netherlands 2012), The Waiting Room (Stories & Journeys, Gwynedd Museum & Art Gallery, Bangor, North Wales 2012), The Beauty Shop (198 Contemporary Arts & Learning 2008), The West Indian Front Room (Geffrye Museum 2005-06), The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home (Black Dog Publishing 2009) www.thefrontroom.org.uk/ He has an Arts Doctorate from Middlesex Univ. 2010 and is currently an Associate Lecturer in Cultural & Historical Studies as well as Associate Researcher RAS project at London CSM/Wimbledon CSM, UAL.