Activism through fashion: State repression and the politics of fashion in Biafra Southeast Nigeria

This chapter examines the cultural politics of fashion in the Biafra separatist region of Nigeria considering the motivations, strategies and consequences of people's dressing choices employed as resources for Biafra nationalism. We examine the tension animated by the government's counter-strategy to eliminate the production, consumption and circulation of fashion taking into account the materiality, positionality and temporality of Biafra fashion as a mobile corpus of local agency of resistance choreographed by social media, local propagandists and celebrities. The findings of the study show that state repression has reordered and shifted the zone of Biafra nationalism to fashion even as the politicization of fashion as an expression of protest and dissent is violently pursued through the production and consumption of clothes that communicate defiance against a repressive federal government. Therefore, Biafran fashion has become a viable agency or "weapon of the weak" used to confront and mediate the repressive state. Primary and secondary sources of data are used. Primary sources include oral interviews with Biafran fashion consumers and producers and secondary data like journals and newspaper reports. Collected data were analyzed qualitatively.