Osei, Krys. 2025. Bloom in Amaryllis, Twirl in Marigold: An African City and Our Remixed Geographies of Beauty, Fashion and Freedom in Accra, London and Washington, D.C.. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

Soundtracked by lyrical self-portraits of my spiritual being and becoming in Black girlhood and beyond, through the discographies of Missy Elliott and Mariah Carey, this thesis is a flowering archival resuscitation of my Ghanaian Cameroonian diasporic visual history. While film, television, and music remain the central focus in the exploration of Black expressive culture and transatlantic cultural synchronisation, studies pertaining to the ethical project of beauty, fashion, and improvised style geographies remain at the periphery. Through the lens of multi-sited Black feminist autoethnography, this thesis further considers the important convergence of postcolonial luxury aesthetics, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and cultural geography, while reconceptualising fashion as an imperative negotiator of embodied authorship, possibility and belonging. As a cultural heritage project, I unearth an interior exploration of the aestheticisation and stylisation of the globally popular online series, An African City, by articulating what the world of fashion symbolises to producers and audience viewers in Ghana and the diaspora through floral collage portraits inspired by my mother’s gardens. A key contribution of this endeavour is the conjoining of production and audience reception studies—two fields that seldom meet within cultural studies paradigms, despite their common examination of power. Drawing from 67 in-depth interviews conducted across three metropolitan routes that inform my personhood: Accra, London and Washington, DC, this research illuminates multidimensional perspectives concerning the on-screen depiction of glamorous African womanhood, while further mapping the transatlantic cultural synchronisation of how Ghanaian women affectively stylise towards the feeling of home, the succulence of beauty, and remixed desires for freedom—with great care. The cathartic rhythm of these dynamic interpretations establishes that a multi-sited autoethnographic approach to fashion and cultural studies, housed within Black feminist cultural memory and experimental pleasure activism, reinvigorates the critical function of embodied aesthetics as rebellious ornamental modalities. This is our remix.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00039393
Keywords:	African Media, Aesthetics, Beauty, Black Geographies, Black Feminist Autoethnography, Diaspora, Fashion, Hip-Hop, Ornamental Horticulture
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Media, Communications and Cultural Studies
Date:	31 July 2025
Item ID:	39393
Date Deposited:	14 Aug 2025 14:59
Last Modified:	14 Aug 2025 15:04
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/39393

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