Wearing the Ghanaian border: performing borders through the National Friday Wear programme

Abstract

This paper argues that cultural and political strategies that appeal to citizenship and national identity can be used to regulate flows across borders. In this process, citizen bodies may be enrolled as key agents. Drawing on the National Friday Wear programme–a Ghanaian government initiative intended to encourage white-collar workers to dress their bodies in domestically produced textiles on Fridays to reduce the consumption, and thereby also the inflow, of foreign textiles–the paper illustrates that citizen bodies are both spaces upon which borders are inscribed and geopolitical actors that perform borders on behalf of the nation-state.