thank you so much for having me here
today
I'm going to be talking to you a little
bit about a particular type of sandal
that was popular on the coast of East
Africa but first I want to take a step
back and talk a little bit about the
humanities so art history is situated in
the humanities which is largely broken
up into area studies disciplines so
thinking about sub-saharan Africa as a
unit of study or Europe or Asia or North
Africa and the Middle East and what's
important to remember is that these are
much more than just geographic
boundaries but they're also racial
boundaries and so if you think about
North Africa and sub-saharan Africa and
Geographic terms they could be very
easily put into the same unit but
because one is dominantly Arab and one
is dominantly black African that they
get kind of parceled out into separate
units and so how I see my research
fitting into these studies or this
conversation is by kind of breaking down
some of these boundaries and thinking
about cross-cultural interactions and so
in come my my sandals as I like to call
them which were popular on the East
African coast so an example of which is
found on the upper right hand side and
the style of these type of sandals is
typically kind of noted for this
platform base and peg at the at the
front to which like which you would grip
between your big and second toes and the
form actually originates from India and
was brought over to East Africa sometime
between the 17th and 19th centuries and
in India where it was previously
associated with Hindu deities it now
becomes associated with a certain class
status in East Africa and so it becomes
associated with asserting class status
particularly because it comes from
somewhere else and so it allows the
upper class to really be able to say
that I can connect with elsewhere that
they see themselves connecting to either
a real or an imagined elsewhere and so
in doing this you can see that people
are envisioning themselves is more than
just located in one particular place
they're connecting much more broadly to
kind of global systems of trade
and so in a way these sandals can really
be seen as surpassing some of these
standard geographic boundaries that
would separate India and East Africa
from each other instead they're showing
how people were always imagining
themselves much more than just as a
particular race but or a particular
place but always attached to broader
systems thank you very much
