Indigo occupies a haloed place as a colour, a craft, and a hi(story) of global interactions. Viewed largely as a dye-yielding plant with a specific chemistry and exchange value as a commodity, the guests in this podcast from IIAS' The Channel focus on indigo as a tool for African and Asian self-consciousness. Brought to you ahead of the third Africa-Asia ConFest (June 2025) in Dakar, this episode centres on indigo as a livelihood practice and techno-cultural know-how, specifically in Taiwan and Burkina Faso.

This episode features HAB Academic Director Aarti Kawlra hosting a discussion on indigo with three colleagues, scholars, and educators. Jody Benjamin is an Associate Professor of History at Howard University. His recent book is The Texture of Change: Dress, Self-Fashioning and History in Western Africa, 1700-1850 (Ohio University Press, New African History Series, 2024), which explores questions of state-making, social hierarchy, and self-making across parts of Mali, Senegal, and Guinea through the lens of textiles and dress in a context shaped by an emergent global capitalism, slavery, and colonialism. Min-Chin Chiang is an Associate Professor and the Chairperson of the Graduate Institute of Architecture and Cultural Heritage in Taipei National University of the Arts. Her work focuses on heritage craft, heritage education, and heritage dynamics in relation to community and colonialism. Finally, Jocelyne Vokouma is a researcher in the Department of Socioeconomics and Development Anthropology at the Institute of Social Studies (Institut des Sciences des Sociétés / INSS-CNRST) in Burkina Faso, where she specialises in the aesthetics of indigo in clothing.