Book ID: CBB516070638

The Fabric of Empire: Material and Literary Cultures of the Global Atlantic, 1650-1850 (2020)

unapi

Skeehan, Danielle C. (Author)


Johns Hopkins University Press


Publication Date: 2020
Physical Details: 201
Language: English

"Textiles are the books that the colony was not able to burn."—Asociación Femenina para el Desarrollo de Sacatepéquez (AFEDES)A history of the book in the Americas, across deep time, would reveal the origins of a literary tradition woven rather than written. It is in what Danielle Skeehan calls material texts that a people's history and culture is preserved, in their embroidery, their needlework, and their woven cloth. In defining textiles as a form of cultural writing, The Fabric of Empire challenges long-held ideas about authorship, textuality, and the making of books. It is impossible to separate text from textiles in the early modern Atlantic: novels, newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets were printed on paper made from household rags. Yet the untethering of text from textile served a colonial agenda to define authorship as reflected in ink and paper and the pen as an instrument wielded by learned men and women. Skeehan explains that the colonial definition of the book, and what constituted writing and authorship, left colonial regimes blind to nonalphabetic forms of media that preserved cultural knowledge, history, and lived experience. This book shifts how we look at cultural objects such as books and fabric and provides a material and literary history of resistance among the globally dispossessed.Each chapter examines the manufacture and global circulation of a particular type of cloth alongside the complex print networks that ensured the circulation of these textiles, promoted their production, petitioned for or served to curtail the rights of textile workers, facilitated the exchange of textiles for human lives, and were, in turn, printed and written on surfaces manufactured from broken-down linen and cotton fibers. Bringing together methods and materials traditionally belonging to literary studies, book history, and material culture studies, The Fabric of Empire provides a new model for thinking about the different media, languages, literacies, and textualities in the early Atlantic world.

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Reviewed By

Review Cynthia E. Chin (Winter 2021) Review of "The Fabric of Empire: Material and Literary Cultures of the Global Atlantic, 1650-1850". Business History Review (pp. 867-869). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB516070638/

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Authors & Contributors
Chen, Buyun
Kananoja, Kalle
Marsh, Ben
Archer-Parré, Caroline
Rasmus R. Simonsen
Geoff Bender
Concepts
Colonialism
Technology and culture
Material culture
Imperialism
Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence
Materiality
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
17th century
16th century
Early modern
Renaissance
Places
Europe
Atlantic world
Atlantic Ocean
Americas
North America
China
Institutions
Sankt-Peterburgskii Akademia Nauk
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