The Self‐Fashioning of the Signares: A Case for Decentring Artistic Modernity.

The article examines the material culture and stylistic identity of the signares, a prominent Eurafrican female community of mixed Afro-European descent in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Saint-Louis du Sénégal and Gorée Island. Through matrimonial alliances with European merchants, the signares formed a matriarchal commercial and political elite, expressing their power via distinctive fashion, jewellery, and architecture that combined African, European, and other influences. The study highlights how their bodily adornment and domestic spaces functioned as social and political statements, challenging traditional art historical categories by emphasizing ornament as a form of female artistic creation. It situates the signares within broader transatlantic networks, engaging with theories of adornment by Gottfried Semper, Charles Blanc, and Georg Simmel, and expands Paul Gilroy's concept of the Black Atlantic to include African coastal societies as active participants in modernity. The article argues for a rethinking of art history methodologies to incorporate such transcultural, gendered, and diasporic expressions of material culture beyond Eurocentric frameworks.