Cloth as Political Language: How Textile Arts Became Instruments of Ideology, Identity, and State Power

Author Information

Manikya Sai Tejaswini Vallabhajosyula, University of North Texas, United States
Lasya Aji Silpa, Appalachian State University, United States
Barbara Trippeer, University of North Texas, United States

Abstract

This paper explores the process by which cloth shifted from depicting Gods to depicting humans, and how it came to serve as a vehicle for political rhetoric, ideological indoctrination, propaganda, and community building. Centered on their use in nation-states and movements across the globe, this study contextualizes textiles as visual media for exerting state control, oppressing communities, protesting against the powers that be, and representing communal membership. Used by governments, reform movements, national leaders, and anti-colonial activists alike, clothed surfaces became battlegrounds through which systems of power were both asserted and undermined. Analyzing examples from South Asia, East Asia, and West Africa, this paper approaches the surface designs of textiles as texts that made systems of power visible. Gandhi utilized hand-spun cotton cloth to promote swaraj, or self-rule, from British textile industries. Military garments, imperial court textiles, and coats of arms across colonial regimes utilized textiles to assert their sovereignty over spaces and their rank over individuals. Kente cloth communicated chiefly authority within African states, and propaganda textiles were deployed to shape the imaginations of the Chinese masses following WWII. Employing a comparative qualitative methodology through the lenses of material culture, visual rhetoric, and archival research, this study argues that textiles served as political manuscripts that solidified power, resisted repression, and constructed ideological systems. Textiles were once used as worshipful grounds for deities to exist, and later came to represent the bodies politic that existed upon them.

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