Claire Wilcox, Patch Work — A Life Amongst Clothes

Abstract

ferent Atlantic locale and a textile medium that is understood broadly through written sources. The first chapter’s exploration of the English writer Virginia Ferrar’s seventeenth-century texts on silkworm production in the colony of Virginia includes exciting archival discoveries and an astute analysis of Ferrar’s published writing, marginalia and drawings. It deftly demonstrates how an English woman used her gendered authoritative understanding of textiles to contribute to colonial knowledge production. The notion of textiles as ‘women’s work’ and the ways in which that facilitated female participation in colonial projects is also explored in later chapters on homespun in colonial New England, the fashions of enslaved and free Creole women in the Caribbean and silk embroidered samplers and globes in the early American Republic. Skeehan shows that, by expanding what counts as a text, we may likewise expand who counts as an author. The intersection of textiles with economic and political systems that sustained, and were sustained by, colonial and racial ideologies is explored throughout the book, including chapters focused on the global cotton trade and Latin American woven textiles. In situating textiles alongside literary texts, Skeehan aims to ‘complicate what we mean by the practice of letters, and ... rethink which authors and what texts constitute the corpus of early American literature’ (p. 3). It is a laudable and methodologically interesting project. Ultimately, however, I think it is one that is mainly intended to contribute to literary history. While the book offers nuanced analysis of a wide range of specific written texts, from business letters to novels, textiles are mostly simply described, usually as a category or type. Discussion of actual examples of textiles are few, and they are afforded little contextualisation or substantive interpretation. Citations to scholarship on specific types of textiles are equally thin. Asserting that textiles are ‘material texts’, though apparently intended to elevate the humble textile, has the effect of subsuming visual and material expression entirely to the logic and hermeneutics of the text. Though Fabric of Empire clearly wants to believe that ‘the textile can speak’ (to invoke Gayatri Spivak), the book never really speaks its language. The overriding claim that textiles, too, are bearers of meaning is unlikely to be revelatory to readers of this journal. As such, despite Skeehan’s aim to challenge dominant narratives and decentre disciplinary norms, the book curiously ends up reinforcing the disciplinary boundaries it seeks to dissolve.