Following the Threads: Reading Eighteenth-Century Texts and Textiles against the Grain

Abstract: This article traces a multidirectional circulation between eighteenth-century texts and cotton textiles and contemporary literary and artistic fabrications . It juxtaposes dehumanizing depictions of colonial textile production in works including the Encyclopédie to a historical study in which a cotton sack once owned by an enslaved woman occupies the center of the narrative, and to changing approaches to the history of textiles on the part of museum curators and designers. It concludes by turning to a recent novel by a Togolese-Canadian writer in which bioengineered cotton production in contemporary Africa is interwoven with the history of slavery and the cultural politics of museums.