Black Material Geographies

Episode 8

Black Cotton

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

I was told it was invisible hands pushing needles through fibers picked by humans whose lives were seen and are seen as disposable. Pulling the thread towards liberation, hoping to stitch a better future for their children, not the children who will perish in the same position as them, but their children's children's children who will hopefully emerge wounded, but free from this current system. Cotton is not innocent and neither is fashion. We are extracting resources, labor, and culture. Oil permanently soaking the underside of fingernails that will never consume even one 10th of the products their work produces. The world is infinite, but we are not. In fact, we are very finite creatures, living only seconds from our mere destruction, but for black life, the reality of premature death has always been part of our consciousness. See, 200 years ago, we were picking sugar, coffee and cotton, now black bodies drown crossing the Mediterranean and the ocean.

This extraction has caused patterns of migration that are far older than your vintage denim. In prison, they make our license plates and used to make the sneakers called Jordans, while Michael Jordan is making multi-millions, Jordans were made in prisons by boys, now men, who probably waited in line to buy those same shoes to feel a sense of value. They thought the sneakers would make them feel important. When your life is not valued, you look for value in consumption. I read it was invisible hands who allowed me to lead the life I live, but these people are not invisible, they are overlooked. We, the people, the least evolved species on this planet, taking up more space than we can honor in this moment, we have an opportunity to refashion our existence. I mean, redistribute our ignorance into resilience. I mean, reimagine sustainable futures, expand our consciousness.

I mean, we, the people, are only a few steps away from liberation. We, the people, here and now, can wipe the tears of the next generation. If only we realize that the earth has been here, we are just a tiny instant in the universe. It's humbling. From the cliffs of privilege, it may seem like fashion is separate from violence. All of our consumption stems from the same system, but luckily, we can change this. We must grab these visible, invisible hands, not hiding, but working in plain sight, we must grab hold of each other, not dominating, but working collectively towards freedom. We are not each other's enemies or rivals, we are each other, literally, and there is no separate survival. As we walk through this world clothed in the tethers of society, we must remember that every single fiber is connected to a lineage and a story.

My ancestors, all across the Americas, from the Southern United States to Jamaica, picked, labored, and toiled the soil, so that I, and you and you, and you can live in the global world and have important intellectual feelings. So now I, and you and you, and you have to honor their presence and their wisdom with our choices and the fight towards freedom. I am cut from a different cloth. A quilt of resistance made colorful by the plants naturally growing from the dirt. I am the hemp seed 12,000 years ago. I am because they were, I am because we are. From the minerals and the loam to the threads in my clothes, our lifestyles are made possible by the sacrifices of my ancestors. 

Welcome to Black Material Geographies, a show that explores the stories behind forgotten fibers and the fabrics you think you know. My name is Teju Adisa-Farrar, and I'm speaking to you from Lenapehoking, also known as Brooklyn, New York.

Cotton plants have been growing on earth for about 10 to 20 million years. The cotton plant originated in the Indus River Valley, modern-day Pakistan, but was domesticated independently and simultaneously in both the new and old worlds by indigenous humans. Cotton is native to tropical and subtropical regions, but is very adaptable, which is why it was domesticated so widely. Most humans in the world have a relationship to the cotton plant. Certainly every human in the Western world does on a daily basis. From clothing, to bedding, to furniture, it's even used in the bookbinding process and fishing nets. It is one of the most, if not the most widely used natural fibers on the planet.

But less than 300 years ago, most places in Europe had no or very little access to cotton. For most of the history of cotton cultivation, Europe and Europeans were non-existent or played a marginal role. Cotton is one of the plants that catalyzed British colonialism. The cotton plants' history in the Americas is inextricable from the history of black people in this region. Cotton and black humans are central to the overall development of the United States as one of the most powerful countries in the world. Cotton cultivation in the Americas through plantation slavery, allowed Britain to take control of the global cotton trade and surpass India as the largest textile manufacturer in the 19th century.

Cotton is grown in more than a 100 countries around the world, and most of us don't even give this plant a second thought, even though it is a foundation in our daily lives. When we think about all the ways cotton has created our lifestyles, we realize that black history, agriculture and Western economic development are all connected. There is no one story of cotton in the Americas or in the US. At every stage of cotton cultivation and production, there are stories that have been lost, stories that we don't know and stories that we only hear one side of, but all of us have a cotton story. I chatted with scholars, Sha'Mira Dean Covington and Anna Arabindan-Kesson about their relationship to cotton and how it is integrated into the work they do in fashion, fibers, culture, and art.

Sha'Mira Covington:

My name is Sha'Mira Covington. I am a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia currently. I'm originally from New Jersey, but I live in Atlanta, Georgia. My relationship to cotton is more spiritual than anything. I study dress and fashion and textiles, and I am a black woman, so I have a very deep connection with cotton based on my ancestral lineage and my relationship to clothing and textiles. And so I see it as a very spiritual connection and one that is based on heritage. I look at dress and fashion, textiles, through a cultural lens. So my study of cotton has been, I'll say, holistic because I am in dress and textiles and I take a merchandising slant. I look at the commercialization of cotton, how it's used in visual material cultures. How cotton has historically been used in the fashion industry and how it's currently used in the fashion industry.

Cotton has a really interesting history, I think, in the fashion industry, because it's a very discreet relationship to the fashion industry and it's very disconnected. When you say, "Cotton," you don't necessarily think the fashion industry because of how we view it as glamorous and luxury. Cotton's not always seen as a luxury item, more so now in contemporary times, but historically, cotton is connected to both European colonization in the Americas, African enslavement, is also connected to indigenous land resources, hoarding. And this history is usually seen in economic or historical context outside of how we view the fashion industry now as a very diverse and global marketplace, right?

Based on just my research, I've learned that slavery in itself was a global enterprise and it's deeply connected to the fashion industry and cotton is implicated and interwoven in those histories. And so we see that European settlers imported Africans into areas such as the West Indies, Central America, South America, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English, and the French. They controlled about half of the transatlantic slave trade. And they took much of their human cargo slaves and transplanted them into colonies that were created in the Americas. And a lot of that free labor was used on cotton plantations. And cotton really grew the American market in commerce, in fashion and textiles. It's pretty much what allowed the US to become an industrialized nation. And so the fashion industry, although disconnected and not recognizing these histories with cotton, is definitely implicated in that long legacy and history of slavery and indigenous land theft.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Anna's ancestry also intersects with cotton and colonialism, though originating from a different geographic perspective. Her personal history is also tied to one of the many stories of cotton.

Anna Arabindan-Kesson:

I'm from many places. I was born in Sri Lanka, grew up in Australia and New Zealand. And after a lot of travels, have found my way to Princeton, New Jersey, where I teach at the university. I'm an assistant professor in African American and Black Diaspora art. And I have two positions in African Americans studies and art history. So I have many, many things that I have done and continue to do. I think it has a lot to do with my own experiences of moving and migration. I kind of jokingly, but not jokingly say that I really am a child of empire. I've spent most of my life in places that were former British colonies. And when I came to do my PhD and came to think about the topic I wanted to really focus on for my dissertation and more broadly, I wanted to find a way of working through some of those experiences of movement.

The ways that colonialism has shaped our experiences of place, of identity, of race. And I came really to cotton through those questions because of its history as a commodity that really tied so many parts of the British empire together and as a commodity that was so central to the development of Western modernity. But, of course, was also intimately bound to that other structure of Western modernity, which is the history of slavery.

And then more specifically, I think it was also working with artists like Lubaina Himid whose work deals very much with these histories that really kind of made me realize that there was a lot to be done and said about the meanings and the ways that cotton has had an impact on how we think and see, and relate to each other, and feel. And it's funny because when I originally conceived of it, I wanted to look at South Asia and the Caribbean, and so bring the Indian and Atlantic worlds together. And this is what I do. I tend to have these very ambitious plans and then realize that I will be doing them for the rest of my life.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

The stories of cotton are inherently global stories that tie together networks and identities across the planet over thousands of years, first through cultivation, and then through violence, power and dispossession. There's no way to capture all the perspectives of cotton as a plant is far too vast. Cotton has always been part of the visual culture and economic value of many industries, especially the fashion industry. From even before fashion was an established global industry, the cotton plant was held up as a standard.

Anna Arabindan-Kesson:

It was like cotton is the fabric that connects us or something. Do you ever remember an advertisement with that? I remember seeing that and thinking, "Oh, this is what people in the 19th century were saying. This is how they were thinking about commodities and the importance of commodities, because they were sort of fascinated by how cotton, or sugar..." I mean, commodities with a slave history, how they kind of brought these other worlds into their kind of small lived experience in Europe or London or wherever. So I think all of those-sort of realizing these frameworks that we use now to think about connection or the circulation of commodities and even fashion, this has a longer history. And often it has a history that has a very violent implication for people of color.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

The fashion industry developed alongside the growing commodification of cotton. This plant not only became deeply embedded into US culture, it also catalyzed the Industrial Revolution.

Sha'Mira Covington:

I think many fashion professionals associate the fashion industry with industrialization, with the North, with New York, namely. And don't take into account that the South was a very important factor in our rise to industrialization in the US. And so definitely bringing to light that enslaved peoples were pretty much on the ground when it comes to the production in the fashion industry at its inception, and also taking into account that enslaved people also used cotton as an act of collective resistance that they used it for material and visual cultures, and that it is deeply ingrained in black people's heritage and legacy.

So if we look at a broad survey of cotton's role, maybe from the 1780s into the 1930s, it encompasses finance, international trade, global business. We see race migration and immigration, and then there's government subsidies and regulations. So there's interactions between the US, Europe and there's global shifts in manufacturing. We see mechanization come to the forefront in industrialization, and then with India, there's these supply and demand dynamics. And specifically in the UK, there was a demand for cotton as their fashion industry was coming to prominence. Cotton was truly like an empire building of many of what we consider the large fashion areas of the world today.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Plantation slavery, the industrialization of cotton and the rise of the fashion industry structured exploitation as part of labor, creating hierarchies between workers and ethnic groups, further established whiteness as the norm and the pinnacle.

Anna Arabindan-Kesson:

That kind of the idea of the global completely erases your lived experiences. It completely erases the exploitation that continues with in terms of who's working, whose labor is being used and basically thrown away. And this was something that, again, in the 19th century, this was a very specific strategy to kind of not talk about slavery and not talk about the exploitation of Indian peasants. So there was this sense that commerce created this global network, which could be celebrated. It was associated with progress and civilization and what the West could bring. But it also meant that then people didn't have to see the kind of realities of where these objects were coming from. And abolitionist people like Frederick Douglass, they were very, very careful to unpick that kind of relationship. And there was an abolitionist called Henry Garnet who travels to the UK.

And he's very, very careful to explain to British audiences where these objects come from, like the sugar, the cotton, just to kind of really emphasize to these audiences that they're implicated in these commercial networks and in these forms of exploitation. And abolitionists do try to actually produce free labor cotton, or free trade cotton. And they try to boycott the use of slave growing cotton. They also do it with sugar. So they try and grow cotton locally. And there are some dresses and some collections in Philadelphia that we have still, as an example of some of those initiatives. They didn't last for very long, mostly because of the expense.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

In the 19th century, slavery abolitionists understood that the global commercial textile networks were not inseparable from the violence of slavery. So initiatives developed to attempt to grow cotton without the exploitation of black people and to grow it locally so that they were not dependent on the colonial global networks. Growing cotton locally could also support less environmentally extractive practices that plantation slavery perpetuated. Cotton plantation slavery degraded and shortened the lifespans of black people. It simultaneously degraded the environment and decreased soil health. The agricultural processes of cotton cultivation on plantations was derived to maximize profits, which led to ecosystem erosion and climate destabilization. The current climate crisis is derived from this dual history of exploiting black people and the physical landscape after having displaced the original stewards from their land

Sha'Mira Covington:

Colonial America's cotton production had a major impact on the environment, because we were clearing land, this resulted in deforestation, and so we see that, of course, habitat displacement for the environment. We see that there's less biodiversity in the areas in which we were cultivating cotton. We also see that there's excessive tillage and soil erosion that hinders healthy soil aggregation in areas. And so we're unable to continue to cultivate or harvest on that particular land. And it also meant that, of course, the enslaved peoples were working in the harshest of conditions when cultivating cotton. And it was a very arduous task to pull cotton fibers from the seed. And so the labor was not only long and arduous, but it could be dangerous at times, especially when you are working in hot conditions. So over exertion and over exhaustion was very, very common on slave plantations that were cultivating cotton.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Like the cotton plants, black people's bodies became associated with the physical landscape of slavery. This meant that the commodification of land, as something that can be privately owned, was figuratively and literally extended to the bodies of black people.

Anna Arabindan-Kesson:

I found texts and I found objects and then images that also help us see how this way of seeing really has implications for how blackness is presented and understood. And so on the one hand, you can think about cotton plantations were kind of tied to this. It was like a gold rush, but for cotton, in the South, right? So people that are clearing land, and of course, it's enslaved people who are doing this labor, it's their labor that is then cultivating this cotton to create these profits. And then, of course, as Frederick Douglass reminded his audiences, it's the value of an enslaved person was completely connected and even reliant on the value of cotton. And of course, that's not just kind of in terms of how they were bought and sold on the slave market, it was also in terms of the profitability of their labor.

So enslaved people's labor was measured in pounds of cotton. We've all seen those images of enslaved people and also sharecroppers picking cotton with the sacks kind of trailing behind. Those bags were a way of measuring black labor. And then on top of that, enslaved people were clothed in very cost, cheap cotton clothing that was made in the North. So the cotton bales would move to the North and then be sent down as Negro cloth. It was also called Lowell cloth, an older term is osnaburg. But there were all these different kinds of terms, but Negro cloth was the most common. And because of particular sumptuary laws regulating enslaved people's dress, this cloth had to be coarse and it was meant to be kind of plain and dull. And it was very cheaply made. It was a sort of very basic plain weave. But that also had an impact, I think, on how enslaved black people were literally seen, this type of cloth was a kind of uniform, but also I think visualize their value as property and as objects. So in that sense, I think there's a very intimate connection.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Black people's relationship to the cotton plant and cotton fibers are not just mired in violence and exploitation. Tropical West Africa has a long lineage of cotton cultivation and textile culture. Not only did enslaved Africans build onto this legacy, they also developed new relationships to cotton throughout slavery and post emancipation. It was used for utilitarian purposes and as a mode of resistance.

Sha'Mira Covington:

Black folks have always used cotton in both functional and artistic forms. Essentially there's a need for warmth and comfort, so black folks would use cotton to warm themselves with quilts. And they were also tasked to spin weaves, so quilts for their white mistresses and masters. But because of that, they became highly skilled makers of quilts and bedding and creatively used cotton to care for themselves. They produced quilts with hidden and coded messages, particularly during the Underground Railroad. And these quilts could communicate coded messages to other families, other black folks, and one of the most prominent quilt makers, Harriet Powers, she was born into slavery and she survived through the civil war and she's known as the mother of African American quilting. And so she did world renowned story quilts. She wove biblical and secular tales into the quilts. And these are celebrated as works of art.

These are learned about in art history courses, and also black folks fashioning their body with cottons, like head wraps, for example. And these were sometimes made with course home spun cotton, or what was called Negro cloth. But women used this to wrap their hair. And in some places, this head wrapping was a mainstay. So it was an Africanism that survived through slavery. And since cotton fabric waste was the only thing available, black folks being creative, fashioned their hair in these cotton wraps. And we still have head wraps to this day. We also have instances of areas where head wraps were a part of sartorial laws, like in New Orleans where black women, free or enslaved, had to wrap their hair as a badge of inferiority. And this law was supposed to make black women ugly and undesirable to white men. But as black women styled these wraps, they became elegant and a mark of distinction. So the relationship of cotton with black folks, it's a hard history and hard legacy, but we've also used a lot of that spiritual information, I'll say, to also empower ourselves.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

In the many stories and histories of black communities in cotton, ingenuity and sustainability as survival are clear themes. Before upcycling was a thing, black women were using cotton fabric waste to create textiles because that is what was available to them. So when we talk about sustainability, we need to also discuss these stories of black women being sustainable out of necessity.

Sha'Mira Covington:

Because we can't keep just talking about it. I think cause for sustainability are, in my opinion, in the fashion industry, especially, way too late and going far too slow. I think that clothing and dress is imperative to self-expression, especially black self-expression, but the fashion industry is violent and we need to stop supporting an institution that doesn't support us, full stop. It's harming people in the environment every day and this is its legacy, as we know through cotton, and that's just one fiber. And I don't think we can expect change out of the fashion industry this late. And so my hope in doing this reparative work is one that is more swift than it has been going. And I think that just calls for a complete overhaul of what we consider sustainability or environmental justice or racial justice in the context of fashion. For me, fashion and dress clothing, it's a part of our social capital, of black social capital, right?

Because we've historically used our bodies as a means of empowerment, as a means of resistance. And that includes the ways in which we fashion ourselves. There's our hair, there's our clothing, the colors that we choose to put on our bodies. These are all things that represent our cultural heritage and they always have, it's always been that way for black folks because we live in a society that has deemed the way we look and be and are as wrong. So the connection between clothing and fashion is a part of our heritage. And I think that the iterations of black representation in the fashion industry has been exploitive historically. The fashion industry has used black people, our heritage, our bodies, our protest movements for capital gain, and they've not done the reparative part of that. And so essentially, most of what the fashion industry supports around us is for their own capital gain.

And I'm a lot more interested in safeguarding our cultural heritage and ensuring that we are the profiters of it as opposed to the industry taking and continuing to take without giving. I know that when the fashion industry takes something and deems it a commodity, it loses all connection to where it originated. And I think that's by design, right? When we see a designer take something like hoop earrings and make it high-end luxury fashion on purpose, there's no connection to where that style actually came from, which is black and Spanish girls in the hood deciding that they want to be ostentatious in their jewelry. And I don't know why that is, aside from just plain erasure and exploitation as the fashion industry does.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

We place such high value in industries that have enshrined exploitation into their supply chains, so much so that most people have no idea who tends to the plants that become the natural fibers that eventually become our clothes. The opaqueness of the fashion industry is a tactic that was used to justify cotton production using slavery. If people don't see the violence, then they'll be fine consuming the product. Anna's book called Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World, tries to balance articulating the violence with articulating the system that the violence created.

Anna Arabindan-Kesson:

It's difficult, violent imagery. I was very aware that there's a danger of re-inscribing that violence simply by recounting it. And so what I really also wanted to show with using these contemporary artists, but also looking at how 19th century black actors and abolitionists and artists were trying to redefine value. The book is really about how we value each other. It's trying to show how our concepts of value have been framed through this capitalist framework of transaction and profit and exploitation. That's not value.

I hope the book will help people understand... Not just understand, but be able to see for themselves and kind of start to be involved in their own process of kind of deconstruction, of how representation, how images have been created, how they've circulated and how they continue to influence our perceptions, not just of ourselves and of each other, but I think they actively influence the way society is structured. And moving on from that, for me, well, the other two really kind of key aspects here is that meaning is sticky and it's messy. And I was trying to kind of work my way through that and sort of describe how meaning congeals around objects, how it becomes embedded in materials. And I think we need to understand those meanings if we want to start working towards something else.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Understanding how cotton is embedded into systems of violence and exploitation can help us create something different, which is what we desperately need.

Sha'Mira Covington: `

In an ideal world, black artists, designers, consumers wouldn't operate in the current fashion industry, for me. So that's my wish, my dream, that we would have something outside of what the mainstream fashion industry is because it is not for us and is more exploitative, like I said. When I envision what that is, I don't know because it is yet to exist. I envision black liberation and indigenous sovereignty over all things when it comes to what ideally an institution would be in my eyes. And again, it doesn't support us and so I think there's a complete overhaul that needs to happen. And all of these things would exist outside of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, racism. And since we have all of those things, I don't know, Teju, I don't know.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Cotton itself is not the problem, colonialism made way for industrialized capitalism. It did this through violence, destruction of indigenous people and practices and the mass monocultural cultivation of cotton. European colonialists created these structures to enrich themselves from one of the oldest most useful plants in history. The problem is we are still experiencing these social and economic structures even today. Cotton is one of the most important fibers in human history. We all contribute to cotton futures and the cotton present.

Understanding the links between the cotton plant, colonialism, and capitalism can help us create more sustainable production and honor the legacy of black people whose labor, ingenuity, and knowledge created the economic foundation for this country. 

It's time for the wind down. I invite you to take a deep breath and stretch your body. Release tension in your shoulders, jaw, neck, taking a moment to reflect on and process our conversations today. I invite you to take a deep breath and reflect on the fiber of our lives. To the humans whose sacrifices created our material realities, they are the ones who should be celebrated in history. Thank you to the enslaved Africans who had many relationships with cotton before and after slavery.

Thank you for caring about a very old plant that catalyzed economies and brought together globalized geographies. Thank you for listening, learning, and experiencing the material geographies that we are all made of.

You can subscribe to Black Material Geographies anywhere you get your podcasts. Black Material Geographies is part of the Whetstone Radio Collective. This podcast is a team effort. Thank you to the Black Material Geographies' team, my producer, Tiffani Rozier, audio editor, Ray Royal, composer, Philip Colletchi Nnamdi Iro, researcher, Haven Ogbaselase, and intern, Kai Stone.

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