In-Between Textiles, 1400-1800: Weaving Subjectivities and Encounters

In-Between Textiles is a decentred study of how textiles shaped, disrupted, and transformed subjectivities in the age of the first globalisation. The volume presents a radically cross-disciplinary approach that brings together world-leading anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians, conservators, curators, historians, scientists, and weavers to reflect on the power of textiles to reshape increasingly contested identities on a global scale between 1400 and 1800. Contributors posit the concept of “in-between textiles,” building upon Homi Bhabha’s notion of in-betweenness as the actual material ground of the negotiation of cultural practices and meanings; a site identified as the battleground over strategies of selfhood and the production of identity signs troubled by colonialism and consumerism across the world. In-Between Textiles establishes cutting-edge conversations between textile studies, critical cultural theory, and material culture studies to examine how textiles created and challenged experiences of subjectivity, relatedness, and dis/location that transformed social fabrics around the globe.

About the Author

Beatriz Marín-Aguilera is a Derby Fellow at The University of Liverpool working on the archaeology of Indigenous slavery in the early modern Americas, and the Caribbean and Chile in particular. Until 2022, she has been a Renfrew Fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and Teaching Associate at the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge (UK). Her research straddles and connects the fields of postcolonial theory, social anthropology, and material culture studies, while contributing to Critical Indigenous and Subaltern Studies. She was trained in textile archaeology in Leiden (Textile Research Centre) and Cambridge. Her research focuses on the archaeology of colonialism and frontiers centring on clothing, body adornment, and body politics, for which she was also awarded a José Amor y Vázquez fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library in 2019. Stefan Hanß is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at The University of Manchester and the winner of a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award (2019) as well as a Philip Leverhulme Prize in History (2020). Hanß works on cultural encounters and global material culture, currently with a focus on the history of hair, featherwork, and microscopic records. His research has been widely published, among others, in Current Anthropology, History Workshop Journal, Past and Present, Renaissance Quarterly , and The Historical Journal .