Textiles as Texts: Trauma-Witnessing, Agency and Intergenerational Memory in The Dressmaker’s Gift

This paper endeavors to unearth the functional potentiality of textiles as ethical witnesses in their own right, utilizing Fiona Valpy’s The Dressmaker’s Gift (2019) as a narrative site. Engaging with the idea of sartorial agents as the custodians of cultural memory, this study gives visibility to the intrinsic agency of non-human materialities, thereby traversing the boundaries of anthropocentric hierarchy. Felman and Laub’s theory of testimony, Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT)Footnote1 and Sophie Woodward’s ideation of material imaginations are the theoretical pillars employed for this analysis, with a qualitative methodological framework. Via a close textual analysis of vintage garments and inherited clothing, this paper stresses on reexamining them as registers of corporeal intimacy, trauma and intergenerational memory. Finally, by way of tracing the multilayered linkages between textiles, witnessing and memory, this study contributes to the active debates pertaining to the realms of object- oriented ontology, trauma studies and ethical witnessing.