Aesthetics of Blackness? Cloth, Culture, and the African Diasporas

Keywords:

• African Diasporas
• vernacular cultures
• textiles
• fashion
• domestic spaces
• archives
• cultural and social histories
• creolization
• postcolonial
• self-representation

Setting cloth into the wider context of creolized visual and material culture, this special issue considers the relationship between cloth, culture, and race¹ from the perspective of the African Diasporas across the Caribbean, the United States, West Africa, South Africa, and Britain. The Ghanaian artist El Anatsui captures the importance of cloth’s meaning and function in this context: “the scope of meaning associated with cloth is so wide … [it] is to the African what monuments are to Westerners” (Anatsui 2003). Whilst having practical uses, cloth plays a significant role in ritual whether everyday or ceremonial, secular or spiritual. It becomes saturated with cultural meaning and memory as crafting techniques and family keepsakes are passed from one generation to the next. Cloth can be cut, worked, embellished, manipulated, and transformed, then folded, packed, and transported across the continents—on the move just as the people that make and use it are on the move. To that end this special issue takes as its primary guiding principle the Trinidadian poet, publisher, and political activist John La Rose’s phrase “sense mek before book”², meaning knowledge does not solely reside within the academy; knowledge resides in the everyday, in the streets, in the tacit knowledge, the know-how of people and the lives that they create.

In the Horace Ové film about his life, Dream to Change the World (2003), La Rose elaborates on this conviction and discusses the way in which art, vernacular culture, and social transformation are enmeshed. He asserts that when we African-Caribbean peoples travel back and forth across the continents we become cultural bearers, bringing the creolized vernacular cultures of the Caribbean with us. In this instance the textile objects, images, and texts that provide the focal points for the authors contributing to this special issue might be seen as making visible Paul Gilroy’s black Atlantic concept (1993); a concept that seeks to transcend cultural nationalism, foregrounding instead connection and exchange without forfeiting the acknowledgement of nuanced differences. The notion that cultures continually collide, coalesce, and exchange through movement and migration alluded to by La Rose and Gilroy is echoed by Kamau Brathwaite’s “tidalectics” concept where the wave is used as a metaphor to describe the continual forward, back and forward again cyclical motion of peoples and their mutating creolized cultures (Brathwaite, in DeLoughrey 1998). It describes complex circular flows of collective histories and knowledge production. The constant crisscrossing of the Atlantic ensures that cultural imperatives and expressions, whilst constantly shifting, are shared between African Diasporic communities. There are similarities or reflections; however, there are also deep differences emerging from differing coordinates and experiences. The Caribbean itself might be seen in this context as a landing strip that facilitates such cultural movement across the African Diasporas. Thus this special issue explores the connection between creative making, fragmented yet interconnecting African Diaspora historical narratives and self-representations through the use of cloth on the body, in the gallery space and in the home.

The title for this special issue is borrowed from the bell hooks article An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional (2007). hooks’ article captures both the spirit and key concerns that bind together the essays selected for this edition. She begins by reflecting on the household in which she grew up, explaining how her aesthetic sensibilities have been shaped by her childhood home in the American South. However, she also asserts that it was through inhabiting this environment that she was taught who and how to be:

This is the story of a house. It has been lived in by many people.

Our grandmother, Baba, made this house a living space. She was certain that the way we lived was shaped by objects, the way we looked at them, the way they were placed around us. She was certain we were shaped by space. (hooks 2007, 315)

It is the story of a house, but it is also the story of relationship, of intimacy, of remembering and re-memorying, to reference Toni Morrison (1987). It is the story of the inscription of the hooks’ family history through everyday objects and spaces; it is about the piecing together of the histories of individuals and communities as one might piece together the fragments of a crazy quilt. Her grandmother, Baba, a quilt-maker, teaches hooks to see. hooks learns how to recognize herself. Aesthetics moves beyond abstract theory and philosophizing, approaching instead a way of looking, becoming, and being.

hooks recalls the emphasis placed on artistic expression and cultural production amongst the African-American communities in the south that framed her early years. Freeing the creative spirit was seen as a powerful tool with which to challenge the then social hierarchies based on race, which saw those with black skins placed firmly at the bottom. Everyday artistic expression and cultural production—the visual arts, dance, the written and/or spoken word, song, textile crafts—provided displaced West Africans with a connection to their real and imagined former homes. Engaging in these creative practices became a tangible way of remembering and of writing themselves into the history of their new homelands. It was as though there were invisible threads connecting and binding African Diasporic cultural expressions across the Atlantic. Not that an aesthetic of blackness, if indeed there is such a thing, emerges from an African Diaspora essence, or from some form of African Diaspora essentialism. As Stuart Hall writes, essentialism “naturalizes and dehistoricizes difference, mistaking what is historical and cultural for what is natural, biological and genetic” (1993, 110). This is a crucial point. Rather, hooks calls for the recognition of multiple black experiences and a radical “revitalized discussion of aesthetics” (hooks, 321). She calls for the consideration of aesthetics alongside the uncovering of underlying political meanings all too often seen as rooted in opposition and resistance when viewing works created by black creative practitioners.

This echoes Kobena Mercer’s thoughts expressed in the public lecture Then and Now: the Longest Journey (2016). Mercer discussed the problem of continuing to speak, to critique or to create work from a position of lack. Drawing on the work of leading black British artists such as Keith Piper and Donald Rodney, he spoke of a collaged or combinatorial aesthetic that characterizes discourse and artistic practices; an aesthetic that is rooted in and routed through a relational understanding of identity distinct to African Diasporic experiences. (I would extend this observation to include visual and material culture of which cloth is a part.) Mercer also drew on Hall’s seminal essay New Ethnicities (1988), to recomplexify the meaning of “blackness,” to reconnect the term to its political roots, to urge cultural critics and/or artists to qualify their use of it. Hall notably suggested that “being black” is a “discursive accomplishment, a practice rather than a reflection,” a process of “self-production” aligned to the quest for “belongingness” (1996, v–vii). In sum, this suggests that cultural identity is as much a matter of “becoming” as it is a matter or “being.” With this in mind, hooks’ somewhat provocative phrase “an aesthetic of blackness” (2007), is used here as a catalyst to spark multi-vocal discussions that speak to the relative absence of texts within the field of textile cultures that consider the politics and poetics of cloth from a range of African Diasporic perspectives. The strategic use of plurals—“aesthetics,” “Diasporas”—and the equally strategic use of the question mark in the title is a reminder of the presence of multiple black experiences, intercepted by gender, generation, class, and capital for example, and correspondingly expansive aesthetics underpinning varied cultural expressions. Plurals and question marks also raise the issue of the power of representation, by which I mean the ability of certain words to fix us as “other” through de-contextualization and/or overuse, emptying out the nuances, presenting a one-dimensional definition of blackness and/or diaspora.

In setting out her argument, hooks mobilizes the work of Faith Ringgold, revealing fragments of the artist’s decorative story quilts little by little as her article unfolds. Ringgold is an inspiration to hooks since the artist’s work documents African-American personal and collective (hi)-stories from a range of African-American viewpoints (2007, 326). According to hooks the “magic of quilts” for Ringgold “resides in that space where art and life come together” (2007, 332). This parallels La Rose’s observations above and brings me to the second guiding principle at the heart of this special issue, namely Sarat Maharaj’s notion of “thinking through textiles” (2009). To elaborate further I should like to briefly discuss black British artist Chris Ofili’s tapestry The Caged Bird’s Song (2017), the centerpiece of the National Gallery, London, exhibition Weaving Magic (Figure 1).

Figure 1 The Caged Bird’s Song, 2014–2017, wool, cotton and viscose Triptych, left and right panels each 280 × 184 cm; center panel 280 × 372 cm Installation view, Chris Ofili: Weaving Magic, National Gallery, April 26 – August 28 2017 © Chris Ofili. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London/Venice, The Clothworkers’ Company and Dovecot Tapestry Studio, Edinburgh. Photography: Gautier Deblonde.

Ofili’s The Caged Bird’s Song tapestry is the culmination of a three-year project commissioned by the City of London Clothworkers’ Company, a Livery company set up in 1528 to promote cloth-finishing. On view at the National Gallery earlier in 2017 in an exhibition titled Weaving Magic, the 3 × 7 meters tapestry took up almost the entire back wall of the Sunley Room, the other walls of which were transformed by a tonal gray/black/pumice frieze of androgynous dancing figures painted by the Royal Opera House set designers under the orchestration of the artist. The piece consists of three large panels handwoven at Dovecot Tapestry Studios in Edinburgh. Ofili’s undulating watercolor triptych design was woven by five of the Dovecot weavers, three of whom often worked side by side. The central panel features a seated nude couple. The male figure is strumming a guitar. The female figure sips a cocktail. They seem to be wrapped up in each other’s company, oblivious to the standing figures depicted behind a curtain on the side panels of the tapestry and the Prospero-like cocktail waiter represented by the black Mohican-wearing Italian footballer Mario Balotelli. At first glance it is easy to miss the dark cloud that interrupts Ofili’s tropical blue sky, threatening to disrupt this mythical scene.

The project as a whole was fully collaborative, with frequent dialogue between the artist and the weavers. On the challenge of translating soft flowing lines and bleeding watery imagery into yarns, Ofili states:

I was interested to see if [the medium of tapestry] could capture soft, fluid transitions … with no hard edges … so that the work was, like [Giorgio] Morandi, always in a state of searching. (Ofili 2017, 11)

The Weaving Magic exhibition resonates with this project on many levels. The presence of water as a recurring theme—Ofili’s near-transparent watercolor preparatory works on paper and his design for the tapestry, the tropical turquoise oceans surrounding the triptych scene, the swirling river, the waterfall behind its central figures—reminds me of the use of the sea as a metaphor in Caribbean literature, for example in Derek Walcott’s poetry. Here, in relation to this special issue, Ofili’s otherworldly seascape provides a metaphor for movement and transcultural exchange. It is as though the sea “carries” history. The arc of Ofili’s brushstroke translated into a curve of blended tapestry yarn in my view is a visual suggestion of the ebbs and flows central to Brathwaite’s “tidalectics” concept (1998). Ofili states in the accompanying exhibition video that the work is about fluidity. The work is also about transformation. Within the framework of his mythical island setting, the tapestry’s “fluid transitions,” in a constant “state of searching,” reflect diasporic identities in continual flux, caught in cyclical processes of becoming, and the mutating creolized cultural expressions generated by them. Meanwhile, the beach has been theorized as a transitional setting of crossing, cultural interaction, and intermingling (Dening 1980). Ofili’s central characters, glimpsed as if from behind a curtain, under the watchful yet tearful eyes of the Prospero-like cocktail waiter represented by Balotelli, are effectively in a liminal space. There is an eerie calmness about the scene. This dream-like scene essentially depicts a temporary paradise. Is a tempest about to hit? Are the central characters on the brink of flight? This speaks to African Diasporic experiences that, for those of us with Caribbean heritages, begins with the enforced movement of the Atlantic slave trade and has continued with subsequent movement from former colony to former colony to metropole and back. Balotelli’s presence is significant. A footballer of great talent and skill, he has nevertheless, and perhaps unsurprisingly, been the subject of racial abuse on and off the pitch. This adds another layer of meaning and relevance to the work. It is out of such collision, contradiction, and turmoil generated by movement and migration that the creolized black aesthetics written of by Gilroy, Brathwaite, hooks, the authors, and myself featured here emerge; after all, creolization was and is a process of contention not blending.

By naming the tapestry The Caged Bird’s Song Ofili reconnects his audience to Maya Angelou’s autobiographical work I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. In the exhibition video Ofili suggests that the caged bird symbolizes a human being. In Angelou’s text the bird’s song represents not only her voice but also the voices of African-American women who “sing” though entrapped by disadvantage, by disavowal, abuse, racial predjudice; the caged bird sings of freedom. In each volume of Angelou’s autobiographic series there is a sense in which one’s voice, one’s creativity, one’s identity can never be stolen. This is about agency. There is also the underlying question: which is the sweeter song, that of the caged or the un-caged bird? Additionally in Trinidad, Ofili’s adopted home, birds symbolize the release of one’s spirit from the earth at one’s passing (Minna Moore Ede 2017). The display of Ofili’s tapestry in the National Gallery exposes these ideas to a wider audience, as does the collaborative nature of the piece’s production. Notions of rising and pushing against entrapment, breaking through society’s invisible borders rooted in negative readings of difference, move beyond African-Americans. “Art and life come together,” to reference hooks (2007, 332). This notion of the ongoing negotiation and crossing of borders, the continual finding of voice and agency, is, in a variety of ways, woven into the tapestry of articles in this special issue.

In my view, Ofili’s collaboration with the Dovecot weavers exemplifies Maharaj’s notion of “thinking through textiles” (2009). Maharaj’s notion suggests that the making of and meditating on “cloth” is both a means of thinking about oneself and one’s place in the world, and a means of thinking at a conceptual level beyond oneself. The cutting, draping, and rendering of cloth, the thinking through and about cloth, is a subversive strategy. Methodologically “thinking through textiles” is at one level, a means of suturing fragmented diasporic narratives, transcribing histories that would otherwise be obscured, thereby reclaiming and crafting difference. At another, “thinking through textiles” denotes a process of continual “doing and undoing” that allows one to articulate ideas and concepts that are constantly shifting. As a methodology it is comfortable with open-endedness and flux. Hence my use of it as an editorial guide, as a tool in selecting authors and collating articles, fragments in my crazy quilt to, borrow from hooks once more (2007). To that end this special issue should be seen as a tapestry (re)presenting a particular historical moment, a snapshot in time articulated from particular points of view with particular sets of concerns. It cannot be and is not intended to be representative of all African Diasporic viewpoints; it should not be seen as definitive. The articles do overlap in terms of methodology and concern, yet they are as distinct as each authors’ own voices; there is a natural ebb and flow to return to Brathwaite’s (1999) “tidalectics” concept.

This special issue asks:

•	If migration throws ideas, identities, and the meaning of objects into flux, what part do those objects play in the process of being and becoming from the perspective of the African Diasporas?
•	How do today’s multiple migrations inform cloth-based diasporic cultural practices?
•	Do common or parallel patterns of motivations, value systems, and aesthetic biases exist? If so, how might they be defined?
•	What can cloth tell us about being in diaspora that other archival or historical sources, such as those that are written, cannot?
•	How might cloth be used to map diasporic histories?

Taking a cut-and-mix approach that mirrors the bits-and-piecesness of creolized African diasporic cultural expressions, the content includes conversations, reminiscences, photo-essays, and scholarly articles. Many of the authors, for example Godfried Donkor and Michael McMillan, have an intimate knowledge of their subject matters. Many take up an auto-ethnographic approach, drawing on personal experiences. In doing so, this issue set out over three clusters—cloth and the body, cloth in the gallery space and cloth in the home—seeks to capture a range of diverse voices from within the African Diasporas. The ultimate aim is to lever open a current gap within textile cultures, releasing new areas of research and debate.

Cloth and the Body

The articles in this section discuss home dressmaking in Britain and the Caribbean, couture fashion in Jamaica, and the staging and performance of arrival in Britain. The timeline stretches from the late 1940s to the 1970s.

Davinia Gregory and Joy Gregory both take as their departure points the design work and legacy of Jamaican couturier Trevor Owen. Owen dressed the jet-set in the wider Caribbean, the USA, and Europe during a 30-year career which began in the 1950s. Davinia Gregory takes up the changing culture of sewing on the island to examine the 1962 independence moment. In a methodology that I would describe as demonstrative of Maharaj’s “thinking through textiles” (2009), Davinia Gregory charts the tale of two Jamaica’s represented by two houses: The Beach House, once owned by Owen and sewing school once owned by Dee Davis and responsible for training many would-be migrants to sew before their departure to Britain. She investigates the role of the couturier and the home dressmaker in the crafting of new Jamaican identities. In her article Joy Gregory reflects on the 2013 Artists’ Residency at The Beach House in which international artists Davinia Gregory, Marianne Keating, Olivia McGilchrist, and O’Neill Lawrence were invited to respond to Owens’ archive.

Cloth in the Gallery Space

The focus here is on artists and the use of cloth in their work, whether uncut lengths or fashioned into clothing, to tell (hi)-stories, collective and individual. This section came to fruition largely as a result of time spent as the Stuart Hall Library Animateur, Iniva, London (2014–2015).

The first picture essay considers the floor to ceiling soft pencil and chalk drawings by artist Barbara Walker. The installation photographs included here depict the 2015 exhibition Sub Urban: New Drawings, James Hockey Gallery, Farnham, Surrey. Walker examines stereotyping through dress codes or “detached details” (Roland Barthes 2006, 63) sported primarily by young people.

In the second article Nicholas Brown, the then manager of the Stuart Hall Library, gives an overview of the Clothes Cloth and Culture Group, (CCCG), set up by me in collaboration with Sonia Hope and Sanjida Alam. CCCG, over a two-year period, constituted a monthly forum held at the library for creative thinkers across artists, designers, curators, academics, and activists all working with cloth. Trinidadian textile artist Althea McNish was one of the contributors to the forum in April 2015. McNish’s contribution to the field has been somewhat underrepresented. Encouraged to take up textiles by Eduardo Paolozzi, McNish went on to study at the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1957.

Exploring cloth as archival documents, artist Godfried Donkor reflects on the video piece The Currency of Ntoma (2012), in which his late mother, Mrs Mary Badu-Donkor, unpacks her archive of Dutch-wax fabrics in Kumasi, Ghana. He writes:

As youngsters, my siblings and I would sometimes attempt to count the amount of pieces of cloth she had in her room and would often lose count or fall asleep before the end. I wanted to find out the allure of the material and maybe discover a little more about the visual history of ‘ntoma’ in my mother’s words.

Cloth in the Home

The purchasing of the first home in Britain was vitally important to mid-twentieth-century Caribbean migrant families like my own. The dressing of the home, although bound up with notions of Englishness, respectability, aspiration, and memories of a colonial past, was a creative act of creolized cultural expression, of agency, that was much more than merely mimicry, or indeed nostalgia for former island dwellings. Time, labor, and care were invested into the establishment of the home (Checinska 2017).

Denise Noble and Michael McMillan explore these ideas and more. Both take up the image or memory of the crochet doily, a brightly colored object that adorned many African-Caribbean front rooms between the 1950s‒1970s, including that of my parents. Memory and “rememorying” (Morrison 2007), through material culture allows Noble to artfully discuss British colonialism in the Caribbean, post-war migration to Britain and the intersections of race, class, gender, and domesticity. Similarly, McMillan draws on his own memories to narrate a South African iteration of the installation the West Indian Front Room, originally created by him at the Geffrye Museum in London in 2008. Through stories gleaned from oral history workshops with women from Soweto, McMillan investigates crocheting practices in Johannesburg and Britain as expressions of “an aesthetic of blackness” (hooks 2007).

The significance of this special issue thus lies in its attempt to lever open a current gap within textile cultures with regard to the comparative use of cloth by the global African Diasporas. However, to limit its readership to a solely black audience is to underestimate the power of cloth to “speak” and to minimize its potential impact. Engaging with each article, interwoven overlapping multi-vocal histories emerge that ultimately cross racial and cultural divides.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christine Checinska

Dr Christine Checinska’s creative practice as an artist/writer/curator examines the relationship between cloth, culture, and race. The cultural exchanges that occur as a result of movement and migration, creating creolized cultural forms, are her recurring themes. She is currently an Associate Researcher at VIAD, (Visual Identities in Art & Design Research Centre), University of Johannesburg. 

In 2016, she delivered the TEDxTalk Disobedient Dress: Fashion as Everyday Activism and installed her solo exhibition The Arrivants at the FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg. Her publications include Crafting Difference: Art, Cloth and the African Diasporas in Cultural Threads: Transnational Textiles Today, Jessica Hemmings (ed.) Bloomsbury Publications, 2015.

[email protected]

Notes

1. It must be noted that in Britain issues about race are woven into questions about received national history, colonization, empire, class, representation, modernity, and popular culture. Furthermore, in Britain and beyond the interconnecting issues of power and hierarchies of value are enmeshed in race relations.

2. Horace Ové (2003), Dream to Change the World: A Tribute to John La Rose.