Contact Information
Biography Information
Huda (Hudita) Nura Mustafa received her B.A. from Yale University and her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University. Dr. Mustafa’s research interests concern global processes, contemporary crises, cultural creativity, and postcolonial West African urban cultures. Her projects examine the emergence of fields of cultural production often emblematic of Western modernity – fashion and contemporary art – in relation to the dialectics of crisis and creativity, tradition and modernity, and global and local processes in contemporary Africa. She has conducted ethnographic research which encompasses both a local and multi-sited study. A manuscript in progress, Practicing Beauty: Gender, Urbanism and Cultural Creativity in Contemporary Dakar, is a study of artisanal tailoring, fashion and gender in Dakar, Senegal. A second project, ‘Culture’ and the World City, examines the transnational events, networks, cultural institutions, policymakers and cultural producers of global cities. Several essays on Senegalese urban culture (ranging from photography, colonial urbanism, fashion, art to skin-lightening) seek to recuperate submerged practices and histories. Throughout, the projects bridge canonical and emergent scholarly and intellectual fields such as Africanist history and ethnography, the African humanities, and postcolonial, gender and urban cultural studies. Dr. Mustafa has been awarded fellowships from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Social Science Research Council, the Rockefeller African Humanities program, the Cornell Society for the Humanities and the Japan Foundation. She has taught at Emory University and Sarah Lawrence College on Global Cities, African Studies (Anthropology, Politics, Cinema), Social and Cultural Theory, and Feminist Ethnography. Dr. Mustafa has consulted for the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development on several projects and publications related to contemporary African culture and art. She is the secretary of the Association for Africanist Anthropology, a subsection of the American Anthropological Association.
Project Description
Practicing Beauty: Gender, Urbanism and Cultural Creativity in Contemporary Dakar, a book manuscript, and related essays, are based upon extensive field research on popular economy, fashion, and gender in Dakar, Senegal, conducted for over a decade. The study analyzes the expansion and transformation of ‘cutur’ (Wolof; fashion) in Dakar, from 1980- 2007. During this period of neoliberal economic reform and globalization, middle class strategies and debates led to economic and cultural investments in, and contestations around, garment production, fashion and personal beauty. Reconfiguration of gender, class and status identities was negotiated in large part through this domain of popular creativity. Dress fashion is rooted in Senegambian cosmopolitanism and values even more than in French colonial influence. Hence, cutur is a field of both socioeconomic strategy and practical aesthetics in which beauty and value, issues of deep concern to the formation of Senegambian identities and collectivities, are redefined. This case demonstrates that African modernities are neither merely an instance of capitalist global modernity nor colonial derivations, but generate their own practices, images and critical reflections under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
A fieldwork project in progress, ‘Culture’ and the World City, examines the emergence of the ‘Creative City’ as a model of neoliberal urban planning, cultural industry/ institution building and transnational/ multicultural networking. Fieldwork is being conducted across transnational art/ cultural events, networks and global cities including New York, Paris, London, Tokyo, Dakar, and Johannesburg. The project examines how the idea of culture is mobilized, by various agents at various levels, in arenas from popular practice to urban planning and artistic production. The uses of culture- as idea, as product, as identity- mediate formations of imperial spheres, of markets and publics, and cosmopolitan places and subjects.