AN EXPLORATION OF MY AMERICAN DREAM STORY THROUGH KENTE CLOTH

For as long as time can remember, the Ewe and the Asante of West Africa have woven kente cloth. Although colonization, the slave trade, and artificial geopolitical boundaries have all disrupted the region, kente cloth has remained a constant and reassuring presence. In American culture, kente cloth most often appears in the form of graduation stoles for Black Americans who want to celebrate our heritage. Kente, which is produced all over West Africa, represents the ambiguity that we come from as descendants of enslaved people because, for the most part, we don't know where in Africa we come from. As Black Americans, we gird ourselves with a generic idea of Africa forged by our Eurocentric upbringing that stems entirely from our relationship to whiteness or lack of it. Many Americans have millennia-long histories traced by the rise and fall of empires, whereas the story for Black people begins and ends with American oppression. Our story is made up of enslavement and subordination, or inhumanity. This thesis is my effort to regain the parts of my story that were stolen by American slavery. My family descends from the Ewe people of Togo, so our connection to kente is known. My work combines my lifelong love for fibers and my ancestral relationship with kente cloth; the final kente piece uses color to explore the challenges of my reconciliation with my family's history