Colonial feelings: An affective encounter with a Toba Batak ulos textile

Decolonial fashion research has become more prominent in recent years, mainly focusing on demonstrating the coloniality of fashion and fashion studies, or exploring decolonial alternatives in fashion. In this article I will concentrate on how these colonial attitudes arise. Non-western dress collected in western museums has been cut off from the meshwork of relations of the source community in which it came into being. It is kept ‘out of touch’, guarded by modern western museum practices. Unlike pieces of dress collected by institutions, privately acquired textiles can be touched and even worn, offering the possibility of using haptic and affective engagement to relate with a textile. The case study for this article is an antique Sumatran Batak ikat ulos that I bought in a local thrift store, permitting such a haptic approach that I call a material-affective analysis. The aim of this analysis is to uncover colonial affects and feelings that influence the relation between me and the ulos . I combine this with a biography of things to provide historical context and to place the ulos at the centre of the shifting relational networks it was part of in the Dutch East Indies and the Netherlands. I see this as a decolonial strategy that aims to re-animate a Toba Batak textile endowed with affective and agential power while at the same time gaining insight into the lingering affects of coloniality that inform the western handling of non-western textiles.