CALL FOR PAPERS
Conference
Weaving Histories from Below in the Global South
Needlework, Gender, and Empowerment in Southern Africa
Johannesburg 2-3 November 2022
Wrapped around the walls of the Parliament in Cape Town is the Keiskamma Tapestry, created in the 2000’s by more than a hundred Xhosa women. Modelled on the Bayeux tapestry in France, and spanning 120 meters in length, this tapestry tells the epic history of the Xhosa people on the Eastern Cape Frontier.i This work of embroidery brings the voices and the experiences of women into one of the most powerful buildings in South Africa: where policies are made and debated, where budgets are decided, and where power is negotiated. It offers an interesting echo to the tapestry made by Afrikaner women embroidered in the 1950s at the height of apartheid with the ambition to exalt the Boer Great Trek of the nineteenth century — and still on display in the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, a landmark of the Afrikaner memory. As these two examples show, politics, history and memory can surface at the end of a needle and sometimes a needle can be as powerful as a pen, if not as a sword.
Beyond such political questioning, various issues emerge around the objects related to needlework and ornamental activities in Southern Africa. The ambition of this conference is to interrogate how the rich material culture of “needlework” —embroidery, beadwork, weaving, tapestry, spinning, knitting, etc. — can give access to subaltern voices and social actors. Mainly related to women, such culture is often considered ‘modest’ in comparison to male productions. However, in addition to its practical purposes, it provides genuine forms of cultural and artistic expression. In addition, they are part of an economic sector in their own right, whose importance has long been diminished, as women’s labour is often “free” or underpaid. Of particular interest is the positioning of these activities within the everyday, at the intersection of art versus labour, and culture versus history, together with their materiality, and their ability to communicate in non-verbal and non-textual ways that endows them with such potential. Needlework is also part of these so-called “traditions” where innovation has been constant, from the bone needles of prehistoric times to the computer-assisted design of our era.
Black women, who have historically been triply marginalised on the basis of race, class and gender often remain invisible in records and archives. In this context, needlework traditions hold the potential “to give voice to those who might otherwise go unheard”ii as emphasised by Clare Hunter. For instance, the Amazwi Abesifazane (Women’s Voices) memory cloth programme allowed several thousand Zulu, Sotho, and Xhosa women to document their experiences of violence and discrimination under apartheid, and find healing, community with other women, and a place in history.iii By bringing together researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds (history, art history, anthropology, archaeology, economics, sociology, geography, visual arts, etc.), the main objective of the conference is to reflect on how a new set of material objects and practices can offer “new sites” and encourage innovative “critical pedagogies” from which to write gendered and subaltern histories. This perspective has long been advocated by Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall who called for “identifying sites within the continent, entry and exit points not usually dwelt upon in research and public discourse that defamiliarize common-sense readings”.
In the United States, research on African American quilting traditions has shown the way in which quilt patterns were used to guide runaway slaves navigate the perilous journey from south to north as part of the underground railroad, contributing to our understanding of the gendered nature of black liberation and the retention of African technologies, culture and aesthetics, despite enslavement. Passed down across generations such patterns furthermore speak to the relationship between oral histories, story-telling, migration and needlework traditions.v Returning to the African continent, Anitra Nettleton’s work on the changing patterns of beadwork and clothing decoration in nineteenth century South Africa illustrates how such traditions were used by African women to navigate between tradition and modernity, and renegotiate identity in a transforming world thrown open by capitalism, migrant labour and Christianity.vi Contemporary African American artist Bisa Butler also takes up a similar theme – that of the renegotiation of identity — in her work, producing textured quilts from contemporary African fabrics, but drawing inspiration from archival photographs of famous and ordinary African Americas. In so doing her quilts “resurface and reimagine historical narratives of Black life simultaneously situating them in the present withinthebroadercontextofadiasporicidentityandnetworks.”vii Whileneedleworkactivitiescan provide a powerful means for bearing witness and expressions of trauma, they can indeed be mined as expressions of agency.
In line with this approach, the Weaving Histories from Below Conference organisers call for abstracts studying needlework activities from diverse perspectives: as forms of autobiography/biography; as markers, makers of identity, both individual and collective; as discourses on history and on the past; as memory-building tools; as forms of resistance and disruption; as ways of negotiating/renegotiating complex identities; etc. They also expect proposals that consider, in their tangible dimension (both social and economic), these generally artisanal or artistic activities (which places and modes of production? Which networks? marketing channels? organisation of the workforce? etc.) — activities which often lead to the creation of gendered communities (women's cooperatives, for example), of gendered identities and spaces(feminine,orpossiblyqueer,non-binary);etc. Thislistisofcoursenotexhaustiveandall proposals in line with the theme will be welcomed. Contributions can cover a large time period, from the Prehistoric era to nowadays, and stem from all the disciplines of the social sciences.
Dr Annie Devenish (University of the Witwatersrand) Prof. Sophie Dulucq (IFAS-Research) Line Relisieux (IFAS-Research)
Please submit your abstract before 30 April 2022, together with a short autobiography, at the following addresses: comm.research@ifas.org.za and sophie.dulucq@frenchinstitute.org.za
Abstracts should not exceed 300 words (or 2500 characters).
