Subaltern Histories of Global Textiles: Connecting Collections, Expanding Engagement

该项目旨在将18世纪和19世纪印度和印度仿制纺织品的全球历史从白色欧美市场重新定位到非洲裔美国人的市场。这种重新定位的意义是深远的：白色欧美人的消费模式一直是服装和纺织品研究的焦点，因此，白色欧美人的品味被认为是全球纺织品生产、流通和使用的重大转变。相比之下，其他消费市场对全球贸易的影响和冲击却没有得到充分的调查。因此，博物馆和其他教育环境中展示的大多数时尚和纺织品设计历史只反映了有限范围的故事，这些故事随后只与有限范围的游客产生联系。为了解决这种不平衡，我们提出了一个数字化的项目，重点是印度和印度仿制纺织品的使用，由非洲散居在美洲，探索他们更广泛的连接，并对全球生产和消费网络的影响。通过重新聚焦美洲黑人消费者的纺织品历史，该项目与人文领域更广泛的非殖民化工作保持一致，并吸引了那些对全球纺织品和时尚文化的贡献在历史上被忽视的社区。该项目将是第一个将英国和美国领先的设计历史机构聚集在一起的项目，以调查其收藏中未被充分研究的对象和相关历史。我们的研究是基于，并编织在一起，三个收藏：维多利亚和阿尔伯特博物馆在伦敦（V&A），格拉斯哥大学档案和特别收藏（ASC），和库珀休伊特史密森尼设计博物馆在纽约。通过聚合来自三个不同集合的相关元数据，该项目将以面向公众的网站的形式产生丰富的研究资源，提供交互式，图像注释的叙事地图，通过标准化的词汇和编目格式链接相关的视觉，文本和档案材料。可视化和其他补充材料也将通过一个强大的社交媒体参与计划提供，以便在数字领域接触到公众。重要的是，作为一个开放获取的数字化项目，世界各地的学者将能够轻松地从项目的元数据中进行交叉收集研究，并在未来连接类似集合的研究项目中使用我们的模型在不同的机构模式之间进行翻译。我们的目标是通过强调代表性不足的消费者对全球时尚文化的影响，为人文学科的非殖民化做出贡献，并对21世纪遗产机构的责任进行更广泛的重新评估，以及数字奖学金的潜力，以促进非殖民化工作。

This project aims to re-centre the global history of Indian and Indian-imitation textiles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from White Euro-American markets to African-diasporic American markets. The significance of this re-centring is far-reaching: White Euro-American consumption patterns have been the focus for much of dress and textile research, with the result that White Euro-American tastes have been credited for major shifts in global textile production, circulation, and use. By contrast, the influence and impacts of other consumer markets on global trade has been under-investigated. As a result, a majority of fashion and textile design histories as presented in museums and other educational contexts reflect only a limited range of stories that then subsequently connect with only a limited range of visitors. To address this imbalance, we propose a born-digital project focusing on Indian and Indian-imitation textile use by the African diaspora in the Americas, exploring their wider connections to, and impact on, global production and consumption networks. By re-centring the history of these textiles on Black consumers in the Americas, this project aligns with wider decolonisation work in the humanities and engages communities whose contributions to global cultures of textiles and fashion have historically been ignored.This project will be the first of its kind to bring together leading design history institutions in the UK and US to investigate understudied objects and connected histories in their collections. Our research is grounded in, and knits together, three collections: the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (V&A), the University of Glasgow Archives & Special Collections (ASC), and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. By aggregating relevant metadata from three different collections, this project will produce a rich research resource in the form of a public-facing website offering interactive, image-annotated narrative maps linking related visual, textual, and archival materials via standardised vocabulary and cataloguing formats. The visualizations and other supplementary materials will also be made available via a robust social media engagement plan to reach the public where they are in the digital sphere. Importantly, as an open-access, born-digital project, scholars working around the world will be able to easily conduct cross-collection research from the project's metadata, as well as use our model for translations between distinct institutional schemas in future research projects connecting similar collections. Our aim is to contribute to both the decolonisation of the humanities by highlighting the impacts of under-represented consumers to global cultures of fashion, and to wider reassessments of the responsibilities of heritage institutions in the twenty-first century and the potential of digital scholarship to contribute to the work of decolonisation.