tics—in this case, the politics of design in central
Africa’s Kuba kingdom. Over the course of this
article we have argued that the designs dyed, embroidered,
86
and appliquéd onto the textiles worn
by members of the kingdom’s elite allowed these
individuals to perform politics and exercise authority.
Put more specifi cally, we have made a
historical timeline. Using carbon-dating technology,
we have shown how textiles worn by elite
men and women transformed from objects of
pleasure into technologies of enchantment over
the course of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and
twentieth centuries. And while more research is
undoubtedly required to validate and substantiate
our claims, it is our hope that the work we
have done will inspire others to investigate these
visually intoxicating works.
NOTES
1. Sara Lowes, Nathan Nunn, James A. Robinson, and Jonathan
Weigel, “The Evolution of Culture and Institutions: Evidence
from the Kuba Kingdom,” Econometrica 85, no. 4 (2017):
1065–1091.
2. Jan Vansina, The Children of Woot: A History of the Kuba
Peoples (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978),
224.
3. We are deeply grateful to Christopher Bedford, Rena
Hoisington, and Christopher Wayner for their support of
this project. Darienne Turner deserves special praise for
her Herculean efforts on behalf of the exhibition. We are
also grateful to Vanessa Drake Moraga for her helpful and
generous early comments.
4. For more information on the radiocarbon dating process,
we encourage readers to consult Christine Prior, “Forum: A
Carbon-14 Primer,” Hali 174 (2012): 26–29.
5. This textile is actually made from eleven separate panels.
Testing shows that four of these were added in the nineteenth
century.
6. Vanessa Drake Moraga, Weaving Abstraction: Kuba Textiles
and the Woven Art of Central Africa (Washington, DC: The
Textile Museum, 2011), 11. See also Vansina, The Children of
Woot, 220.
7. Jan Vansina, Being Colonized: The Kuba Experience in Rural
Congo, 1880–1960 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2010), 11–18 and 61–64.
8. Vansina, The Children of Woot, 132; Vansina, Being
Colonized, 44.
9. Northwestern University, The Jan Vansina Archives, Box 118,
Folder 30: Jan Vansina, “Kuba Art and Status,” 27 March
1983, 4.
10. Vansina’s Being Colonized is the fullest and most robust
accounting of this history.
11. Indeed, as Paula Ben-Amos has shown in her examination
of Benin royal imagery, in times of political crisis, when
the authority of the court is threatened and in doubt,
elites take refuge in bold and awe-inspiring imagery that
substantiates their right to rule. See Paula Girshick Ben-Amos,
Art, Innovation, and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Benin
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999).
12. Alfred Gell, “The Technology of Enchantment and the
Enchantment of Technology,” in Jeremy Coote and Anthony
Shelton (eds.), Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics, (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992), 44.
13. Ibid.
ART ON VIEW