WEAVING AGAINST EMPIRE: WARPED FEMINISM, AESTHETICS, AND THE ARCHIVES OF FABRIC AND TEXTILE ART

Weaving Against Empire surveys the anticolonial, aesthetic disorientation found in the installation and performance works of Yinka Shonibare, Renée Green, and Raisa Kabir. Forwarding warped feminism as a method of archival ethnography that attunes itself to the material qualities of fabric, the affective particularities of the archive, and the discursive meanings sustained through trope, I cut across disciplinary knowledge formations to seek out the disorienting relationality sustained through Space Walk (2002), the Commemorative Toile series (1991-present), Build me a loom off your back and your stomach (2018), and You and I are More Alike (2017). The aesthetic disorientations cultivated by these artists intervene in the habits of sensation and structures of feeling that accrete within fabrics like batik and calico, or instruments like the mechanized loom, thereby dislodging their function as tropic anchors of identity. These sensory disorientations mingle the sonic rhythms of Philadelphia International Records with the colorful dye-work of wax prints, imbue the intimate touch of sateen with the anti-Black lexicon of Western visuality, and unweave affiliations with the nation-state through diasporic movement. By doing so, these practitioners disorient their audience towards a different inhabitation of the world, alternative schemas of aesthetic valuation, and new sensory relations.Doctor of Philosoph