Subaltern Histories of Global Textiles: Connecting Collections, Expanding Engagement

This project aims to re-centre the global history of Indian and Indian-imitation textiles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from White Euro-American markets to African-diasporic American markets. The significance of this re-centring is far-reaching: White Euro-American consumption patterns have been the focus for much of dress and textile research, with the result that White Euro-American tastes have been credited for major shifts in global textile production, circulation, and use. By contrast, the influence and impacts of other consumer markets on global trade has been under-investigated. As a result, a majority of fashion and textile design histories as presented in museums and other educational contexts reflect only a limited range of stories that then subsequently connect with only a limited range of visitors.

To address this imbalance, we propose a born-digital project focusing on Indian and Indian-imitation textile use by the African diaspora in the Americas, exploring their wider connections to, and impact on, global production and consumption networks. By re-centring the history of these textiles on Black consumers in the Americas, this project aligns with wider decolonisation work in the humanities and engages communities whose contributions to global cultures of textiles and fashion have historically been ignored.

This project will be the first of its kind to bring together leading design history institutions in the UK and US to investigate understudied objects and connected histories in their collections. Our research is grounded in, and knits together, three collections: the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (V&A), the University of Glasgow Archives & Special Collections (ASC), and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York.

By aggregating relevant metadata from three different collections, this project will produce a rich research resource in the form of a public-facing website offering interactive, image-annotated narrative maps linking related visual, textual, and archival materials via standardised vocabulary and cataloguing formats. The visualizations and other supplementary materials will also be made available via a robust social media engagement plan to reach the public where they are in the digital sphere. Importantly, as an open-access, born-digital project, scholars working around the world will be able to easily conduct cross-collection research from the project's metadata, as well as use our model for translations between distinct institutional schemas in future research projects connecting similar collections.

Our aim is to contribute to both the decolonisation of the humanities by highlighting the impacts of under-represented consumers to global cultures of fashion, and to wider reassessments of the responsibilities of heritage institutions in the twenty-first century and the potential of digital scholarship to contribute to the work of decolonisation.