Kettle, A., 2019.

Textile and Place

This special issue explores how textiles can define our identities in ways that are bound up with how they are made and also with how cloth is used in specific places. Place is defined by its physical aspect and its constituency of people, and also by its transactions with other places, in which the exchange, circulation and consumption of textiles play a key role. The first section explores how textiles are involved in codifying place through tradition and memory and through site-specific and community-based practices, while the second section focuses on the role of textiles in movement between places, transmission of histories, the crossing of cultural boundaries, migration, and postcolonialism. Contributors examine how textiles register and record change, and provide a means to place the past in dialog with the present. Textiles can also play a role in making change happen, in strengthening community solidarity and in constructing new ideas of place. Close attention is paid to processes of making and also to the metaphorical resonances of textiles that provide critical and creative ways of thinking through conflicted relations with places and their histories. The influence of textiles extends from the specific and local to global networks of relationships.