To wear and to see: object biographies and the history of mobility in the late nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century Western Indian Ocean

My dissertation aims to determine how the biographies of objects contribute to the history of mobility in the region of the Western Indian Ocean in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century through four case studies of material culture from East Africa that are institutions in the United States. Chapter two focuses on dhows (vessels) and bridges from Kenya and Ethiopia, connecting applied phenomenology and materiality to mobility studies through ships at the Mariners Museum in Virginia, a bridge in Ethiopia, and bridges and ships around Mombasa, Kenya. Chapter three analyzes a collection of xirsi—amulets containing pieces of the Qur’an—from Somalia, divided among three American institutions. The overarching theme of this chapter is the comparison of “macro-mobility,” the movement of the amulets from Somalia to the United States, and “micro-mobility,” the movement of the amulets and the adorned while worn. Chapter four centers on flag fans from Sudan and Southern Arabia (in Arabic referred to as mahfa), which were owned by Emma Hanford Smith and donated to the Gregg Museum in North Carolina by her granddaughter-in-law. Smith created written descriptions of each fan; therefore, much of the chapter will be a textual analysis of her words and views on the fans. The final chapter is based on Ethiopian hand crosses collected by Ambassador Franklin H. Williams and donated to the New Orleans Museum of Art, with Williams’ biography and history of collecting considered. I consult the methods of philosophers such as Fernand Braudel, Pierre Bourdieu, and Mieke Bal alongside foundational thinkers such as Arjun Appadurai, Nicholas Thomas, Igor Kopytoff, and Susan Pearce, who contributed theories on material culture and collections.