Symposium explores the intertwining of texts and textiles
According to Irene Emery (The Primary Structure of Fabrics, 1966), “textile” is not a “fabric” and involves different types of interlacing. The fact that text and textile in Euro-American languages share a common Latin root, texere, or weaving, has provided scholars with the linguistic and conceptual framework to explore the close-knit relations between the two. Broadening our perspectives, the earliest usages of words texte and textiles coincided with the end of the Mongol period, the disuse of the ancient “Silk Roads,” and the inverse increase in the European documentation of the new textiles from the East. Meanwhile, textile and text were also intertwined in East Asia throughout much of the history of writing, evidenced by the use of the common “thread” radical, deriving from the hierographic for a “twine,” in characters for both textile and paper. Across cultures, textiles served as a key receptacle for communal memories and a vehicle for storytelling.
From antiquity to the modern period, texts and textiles often also journeyed the same paths across the Afro-Eurasian and the American worlds. Textile terms of both foreign and domestic origins are broadly found in documents and inscriptions as records of the physical movement of the material and as literary metaphors. Textiles not only clothed physical bodies but also religious texts and any secular writing of importance, for instance, in the forms of elaborate—and often imported—brocades used for scroll mountings, bookbinding, and additional protective pouches.
Inspired by Arjun Appadurai’s characterization of the agency of things, “[if] human actors encode things with significance…it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context” (The Social Life of Things, 2011), “TEXTiles: Intertwining of Texts and Textiles from the Afro-Eurasia and the Americas” an interdisciplinary symposium will bring together numerous international scholars to expand our investigation on the interwoven relationship between texts and textiles by focusing on their mobility across space and time. The symposium takes place November 16 and 17, 2024 in the Gerlinger Alumni Lounge. Among the participants are UO’s Akiko Walley, Associate Professor of Japanese Art (OHC Faculty Advisory Board member 2018–20); Chiara Gasparini, Associate Professor of Chinese Art (2024–25 OHC Faculty Research Fellow); Ina Asim, Associate Professor of Chinese History; and Anne Rose Kitagawa, Chief Curator of Asian Collections at the JSMA.
The symposium is cosponsored by the OHC’s Endowment for Public Outreach in the Arts, Sciences,and Humanities. For more information contact Akiko Walley (awalley@uoregon.edu) or Chiara Gasparini (chiarag@uoregon.edu).