Nationality is Overestimated, and the Modern History of Textiles Can Show Us Why
The beautiful history of painted cotton fabrics that do not have a mother nation
Yinka Shonibare Mbe, a British-born — of Nigerian family — artist, has a series of works of art that use as the main material a fabric named Dutch wax. One of the most powerful works of this series is one called The British Library (2014), a huge installation that traveled the world, and whose first house was the Tate Modern museum in London. In this work, Mr. Shonibare Mbe created a library with more than 6000 books draped up in Dutch wax. In the books, it is written in golden ink the names of important first and second-generation immigrants in Great Britain. You can see names like Amartya Sen (born in India), Helen Mirren (whose father was Russian), Zadie Smith (her mother was Jamaican) and even Winston Churchill (whose mother was American) among them. A website was created with further details and more sources regarding people and immigration in Great Britain.
Maybe what the artist is bringing with this monumental piece is that, even if places like Europe and the US are actively repelling immigrants now, there can be no literature, no culture, no politics nor anything important without immigrants. A country’s cultural wealth is not only made by people who were actually born there, but also by who made that foreign land their own home.
However, there is another powerful analysis on The British Library, and that has to do with the medium used there: the Dutch wax textile.
Immigration has a particularly strong place in Mr. Shonibare Mbe’s work. Not just because of his own foreign origins, but also because of how people assumed he had to present himself based on these very origins. In an interview for Artspace, he told that:
When I was at art school I was doing work about the Soviet Union and the political movement it was going through at the time, which was Perestroika, and one of my tutors at Goldsmiths said to me, “You’re African. Why aren’t you producing authentic African art?” And I thought, well, what does that actually mean? What’s authentic? So, really, my work evolved out of asking those questions, and the issue of how people perceive you through various stereotypes.
The artist made a correlation between theory and medium when he first discovered batik fabrics, which Dutch wax is just one variation, and its history. Continuing in the same interview,
Then I discovered the batik fabrics in Brixton Market, and I learned that they had this very interesting origin: even though they’re seen as African fabrics in Africa, they’re actually Indonesian fabrics that were originally produced by the Dutch for the Indonesian market, but because industrially produced fabrics weren’t popular in Indonesia they were introduced to West African market. I like the global trajectory of the fabric and the way that we perceive it as being essentially African but it’s not.
For Mr. Shonibare Mbe, the fabric was formed by its traveling, "immigration", and not by what people perceive of it in a stereotypical form. And that is where its beauty stands. As an artist, he could not be reduced by an idea of "African authenticity", as his tutor claimed because the very idea of this authenticity is not even true.
Dutch wax is not the only fabric that was created by this intersection. Actually, many painted fabrics made of cotton flourished between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, creating this rich mixing that is African Dutch wax. And they all started in the region where today is India, Indonesia and other places in Asia, spread mainly by European colonial trade.
The colonisation history of the painted cotton
Pretend it is about the year 1600. England is making its transnational routes to establish international commerce, through not peaceful ways but using strength to submit another civilisations into colonisation. The era better known as Pax Britannica was the constitution of colonisation power not through the spread of religion and exploration of minerals (like Spanish and Portuguese colonial enterprises) but through the setting of commercial exchanges. That is considered by many scholars as the starting point of the modern era, and of capitalism as we know it.
The most disputed regions at that time were simply called "the Indians", which corresponds to where today is India, Pakistan, China, Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, and others. In almost all those regions, textile making and painting were already expertise since Antiquity. Textiles were commercialised between the peoples of that region, and also were delivered in Europe by what it is known as The Silk Route. The Silk Route traveled from China through Middle East, traded in the Mediterranean Sea to the Italian independent cities, and then it arrived in Europe. The British enterprise on the navigations had a strong motivation on getting those products straight from the source, and cheaper than buying from the Italian intermediaries.
By the end of seventeenth century, Indian textiles were extremely popular in Europe. According to historian Giorgio Riello, the painted cotton with “Indian motifs” were not even considered exotic, and was part of the daily life, used profusely on clothing and decoration. Even the emerging middle class began to be able to buy this products.
Then, in the eighteenth century, England had an idea that changed the world forever. Two ideas, actually. First, England merchants, entrepreneurs and the Crown discovered that cotton is a plant that can adapt to almost any climate in the planet. So, there was no need for the monopoly of this commodity on the Indians’ soil, and the British started to spread the cultivation of it on its other colonies in Africa and the Americas. Cotton, of course, became way more cheaper and accessible.
Second, the production of cotton textiles — the converting of the commodity material into a manufactured one — was revolutionised by the automation of its processes. Machines based on coal power could make what human weavers could do before, but in a fast speed. That’s right: now it’s the time of the First Industrial Revolution. This extreme leap on industrialisation was caused by cotton fabrics, pushed by the growing needs of British (and later, European) middle classes.
The impact if industrialised fabrics for colonies in the Indians were huge. This nearly crushed the traditional textile makers, due to the fall of sales to the Metropolis. England did not smooth for them either: many colonies were obliged by the Crown to buy a minimum quota of British manufactured textiles.
But I am advancing too much on this Industrial Revolution story, and losing myself from the main point: the painted cotton. European countries were since the beginning of colonisation trying to reproduce at home the painted textile produced in the Indians, even manually. The Portuguese fabric known as chita and the French type of textiles called generally indiennes are examples of that. After the Industrial Revolution, the British chintz became especially popular in the countries’ fashion, particularly on women's desses.
All these fabrics have similarities that recall their Indian origins: they are made of cotton, they are printed, they are colorful, and most of them have flowers and other plants motifs. In the nineteenth century, certainly these patterns were inspirations for the famous textiles of the Arts and Crafts movement, among other manifestations, like the Liberty patterns. By that time, they were already profoundly changed. Nowadays, we don’t recognise them as Indian anymore, but as a "typically British" design.
The origins of Dutch wax
By now, maybe you have noticed that the exchange of cotton textiles in the beginning of the modern era was a complex network that comprises government and commercial interests, manifestation of colonial power and the circulations of images (the textile patterns themselves) that, even if we don’t exactly know where they are from, that is not a really important question. The European consumers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not care about the origins of the painted textiles — that doesn’t mean simply they were ignorants on the matter, but that they incorporated fully those images of the fabrics in their daily lives.
Nonetheless, the circulation of painted cotton textiles did not happened only between the metropolitan centers and their colonies. The colonised spaces of the world had also commercial and cultural dynamics among themselves, even if that, in some cases, was not allowed by the metropolis. For example, the ports of Manila (Philippines), Acapulco (Mexico), and Lima (Peru) established intense and illegal commercial trades — textiles included — regardless of the prohibition, by the Spanish Crown, of any independent commercial activity in the colonies.
Some commercial trades in-between the South part of the world were allowed, and even intermediated by the colonisers themselves. Here is where Dutch wax enters. The Dutch colonial empire has spread throughout the globe, from Caribbean and some parts of South and North Americas, coastal territories in Africa — the biggest one in today’s South Africa — and places in Asia like the south of India and Indonesia.
In Indonesia region, a traditional way of painting textiles is use wax to isolate parts of the drawing, and then dyeing the rest of the fabric. So, the draw becomes the negative of where the paint was applied. This precious technique is generally called batik, and was explored by the Dutch commercial trade both inside and outside European markets. This could be made not only with patterns created on Indonesia, but also with other patterns introduced by the Dutch. As we can guess by its name, Dutch wax is one of these patterns.
The rest of the history Mr. Shonibare Mbe already told us: not really accepted in Indonesian market, the fabric was brought by the Dutch enterprises to West African colonies. There, it became very popular until we even recognise, today, as a traditional, authentic African pattern as much as Arts and Crafts flower patterns are identified as British.
People and textiles
Dutch wax in a medium used by Yinka Shonibare Mbe in many of his works. He defend the characteristics of the fabric on being the result of a circulation, of immigration, and not "authentic" from somewhere, whatever "authentic" means.
It is important to consider, however, that the artist do not seem to criticise any manifestation of traditional African and black culture. Pan-africanism, and the recognition of black people in the Americas and other diasporas as essentially African in the manifestation of clothes, hair and other features of appearance are extremely important as signs of identity, once ripped by colonial violence and slavery.
What is put in check, however, is the idea of nationality, this artificial classification of land and of people that says who belongs to where, who crosses somewhere‘s borders and who in entitled to have the right to live on a specific land. This “belonging” is manifested also through images — what is considered authentic or not, what are the signs of nationality. If nationality itself is artificial, therefore those signs may be too.
The imposition of national images can be hurtful. In Mr. Shonibare Mbe's account, that even meant that he felt forced by others to accomplish the expectations regarding what being the son of African parents mean (of course Africa is not one country nor one nationality, but in the narrow view of some people outside of the continent, it is). That hindered his freedom on what interested more for his creative process and art production. A lot of artists, writers and other creatives are limited by this violently stereotypical view. There is a lot to gain in the manifestation of our own culture and roots; therefore, there’s so much to loose in the enforcement of national stereotypes.
The Dutch wax and other painted textiles show us that there is nothing authentic on their designs regarding a national image, even if it appears so. Their very power is on the superposition of images and cultures, sometimes to be consumed by another completely different culture.
So is the same with humans. What would be of Great Britain without its immigrants, like Mr. Shonibare Mbe has shown us? Or the US? Or Germany, Japan, Brazil, Australia? Our historical, political, social features are not formed just inside a national border, but from immigrants that make the circulation of their ideas, their thoughts, their desires, and their dreams. And none of that can be stereotyped.
