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Post-something Post on Big Bags

Posted on: 2007-04-14

http://koranteng.blogspot.com/2007/04/bags-and-stamps.html

Recently some other blog somewhere pointed me to this blog, from an IBM/Lotus guy who is from Ghana, France, the UK, and the US. He makes these great poetic cross-cultural blog posts that are hard to describe. The latest is about oversized cheap luggage - he calls them 'Ghana Must Go' bags, and in a way they're the global symbol of the dispossessed. He runs with the theme and discusses Scottish Sikhs who get their own tartans, The Graduate, Louis Vuitton, and even provides a playlist.

Every so often I'm reminded that we're all now living in the Cyberpunk future:

So to recap, a Ghanaian, by way of France and England, living in the USA, creates a collage starting with an image of Chinese-produced plastic utility bags taken by a Nigerian living in Spain - a 'theft' of the "Ghana must go" imagery, born of the interlocking episodes of reciprocal deportation and sundry exile between their two homelands, both former British colonies. The plaid pattern on said bags is originally Chinese although it is most celebrated in Scottish fabrics, and the subject of English schoolboy fantasies. Said pattern was transmitted in recent centuries over the corners of the British empire and is rightly part of Indian and especially Sikh heritage.

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