FASHION HIGHLIGHT JOURNAL ISSUE 5: AFFECTIVE PASSAGE IN TOXIC TIMES. FASHION AND JOY AS RESISTANCE
Guest Editors: Khaya Mchunu and Nirma Madhoo

The amplification of right-wing, fascist rhetoric in 2025 is manifesting material effects on the lives of women, trans and queer communities, disabled persons, and Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC). It is a system being visibly re-organised to undo the work of feminists and other activists and exacerbate structural and systemic racism so as to dictate who will serve and whose interests will be served. In their treatise, Camilla Hawthorne and Jovan Scott Lewis (2023, p. 2) write that in spaces of continued “colonialism, fascism, and violent nationalisms”, developing the “theoretical tools necessary to engage with the ongoing production of race and racisms” is a necessary and urgent task.

The study of cultural production must not be neglected in this climate. Edward Said’s theses (1978; 1993) critique imperialism’s territorialisation of culture and its self-representation towards the perpetuation of unequal power relations. Orientalist narratives (Said, 1978; 1993) and the primitivisation of black bodies (Jackson, 2012) are to this day still being used as strategies to justify this agenda. Fashion has been an agent for both enabling and resisting this oppression, showing that the act of dress can be not only political but also affective in how it empowers the bodies it adorns into action (Pinther, Kastner & Ndjio, 2022). In times diffracted by the use of technology, we sense in our daily interactions with social media how fashion in its broad sense is being deployed in the everyday to engage intersectionally with gender and queer oppression, as well as decolonial discourse (e.g., artists like Alok Vaid-Menon, Desire Marea and Rharha Nembhard). In tandem with these arguments, this issue of Fashion Highlight uses fashion to ask, how can we mobilise to challenge the negative effects of these global changes? This call is in the same respect interested in what the particular views, thoughts and praxes of BIPOC fashion scholars may be in relation to their lived experiences of these radical changes.

It is important that Issue 5 provokes multiple views and points of intervention to make explicit fashion’s entanglement with the complexity of the issues at hand. Are there instances and examples of fashion making, worldbuilding, archiving and other forms of fashion praxis that speak of joy, love, pain, beauty, brutality, pleasure, precarity etc. (Love, 2019; Ekpe, Sherman & Ofoegbu, 2023; Okello, 2024; Moore, 2018; Makhubu & Mbongwa, 2019; Wachter-Grene & Chude-Sokei, 2020)? Are these forms of fashion praxis generated in ways that allow BIPOC bodies and other bodies not only to resist but also to allow affective passage for their generative being and becomings? Put another way, how can situated approaches (Haraway, 1988) be used to carve out space to write about ourselves, for ourselves, using modes of fashion?

Fashion’s exclusionary relationship with modernity is a Western concept that ontologically holds up the notion of a singular reality of binarised orders (Jansen, 2020), such as West and Rest (Hall, 1992). Contrarily, when applied in other ways, fashion is a mode of narrating visibility, alternative imaginaries, presence, and futurity, contributing meaningfully to the decolonial discourse (Mchunu & Gounder, 2024, p. 95). Fashion holds the capacity to be applied for resistance and as an intervention to challenge the current atmosphere imbued with instances of gross erasure and silence. Similarly, the formation of joy, amongst others, is a radical choice and a resistance to sub-humanising conditions.

For this issue, we seek contributions that see the value in and of fashion as a site to develop a rich and intellectual discourse around the current political climate in which we find ourselves. The guest editors of Issue 5 invite researchers, historians, practitioners, designers, activists, educators, members of civil society, and more to contribute to this topic. We are interested in contributions that use a critical, transdisciplinary, decolonial, and pluriversal lens for viewing fashion research and fashion practice-based research. We seek contributing authors to share new research that unpacks theoretical and visual/sensorial innovations of fashion studies, enabling the growth of the discipline by continually seeing fashion’s political, cultural, social, and affective value. We also welcome book and exhibition reviews that remain within the theme of Issue 5. In the growing praxis of fashion media, contributions from reviewers of fashion films that tackle the topic will also be considered for publication.



REFERENCES

Ekpe, L., Sherman, A., & Ofoegbu, ED. (2023). Restoring resilience through joy: The pursuit of happiness in the midst of unprecedented times. Equity in Education & Society, 2(3), 317–329. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9899679/pdf/10.1177_27526461231154012.pdf

Hall, S. (1992). The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power. In Formations of Modernity, S. Hall and B. Gieben (eds.). New Jersey: Wiley, 184–227.

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599.

Hawthorne, C., & Lewis, JS. (Eds.). (2023). The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.6557185

Jackson, Z. (2016). Sense of things. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2(2), 1–48. https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/28801/21404

Jansen, MA. (2020): Fashion and the Phantasmagoria of Modernity: An Introduction to Decolonial Fashion Discourse. Fashion Theory, 20(6), 815–836. https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2020.1802098

Love, BL. (2019). We Want to Do More than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Boston, MA: Beacon.

Makhubu, N. & Mbongwa, K. (2019). Radical love as decolonial philosophy: In conversation with Khanyisile Mbongwa. Journal of Decolonising Disciplines, 1(1), 10–26. https://upjournals.up.ac.za/index.php/jdd/article/view/53/9

Mchunu, K. & Gounder, K. (2024). Drum magazine project: A decolonial shift in teaching fashion theory and history. Discern: International Journal of Design for Social Change, Sustainable Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 5(1), 88–101. https://www.designforsocialchange.org/journal/index.php/DISCERN-J/article/view/162/75

Moore, DL. (2018). Black radical love: A practice. Public Integrity, 20(4), 325–328. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10999922.2018.1439564

Okello, WK. (2024). Unspeakable joy: Anti-black constraint, loopholes of retreat, and the practice of black joy. Urban Education. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420859241227956

Pinther, K., Kastner K. and Ndjio, B. (2022). Fashioning the Afropolis: Histories, Materialities and Aesthetic Practices. 1st ed. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.

Said, E. (1993). Culture and imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus.

Wachter-Grene, K. & Chude-Sokei, L. (2020). Black radical pleasure. The Black Scholar, 50(2), 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2020.1727192

ABOUT THE GUEST EDITORS

Khaya Mchunu is an Associate Professor in Fashion and heads the Department of Fashion Design in the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. His research interests, largely approached through the decolonial fashion lens, fall within the umbrella of fashion for social impact, explored through research grounded in (1) community-based research and (2) fashion and dress history through biographical and archival research.

Dr Nirma Madhoo (she/her) is a filmmaker and XR creator based at the School of Fashion and Textiles, RMIT in Naarm, Australia. Working transdisciplinary, her practice-based research investigates fashioned bodies as performative matter and posthuman performance in virtual and extended realities. She is particularly interested in digital storytelling and worldbuilding as decolonial praxis.

You can find all the Call for Papers details and Fashion Highlight journal contacts here: https://riviste.fupress.net/index.php/fh/announcement/view/82