Cotton: Connecting the Atlantic World

“I am looking at a square cotton canvas about 10 cm by 10 cm. A grid of black and white tiles – they look like domino counters - have been painted on it in alternating patterns. This canvas was given to me by the wonderful artist and Turner Prize winner, Lubaina Himid CBE…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. Anna Arabindan-Kesson. 

For further reading:
Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World by Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Duke University Press, 2021) 

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

Transcript

90 Second Narratives

Season 8: “Journeys”

Episode 4: “Cotton: Connecting the Atlantic World”

Sky Michael Johnston:

Hello and thank you for joining me on 90 Second Narratives. I’m Sky Michael Johnston, the host and creator of the podcast. Today, Season 8 continues with another story on the theme of Journeys. Our storyteller is Dr. Anna Arabindan-Kesson an Assistant Professor at Princeton University in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Art and Archaeology. Here she is now with the story, “Cotton: Connecting the Atlantic World.”

Anna Arabindan-Kesson:

I am looking at a square cotton canvas about 10 cm by 10 cm. A grid of black and white tiles – they look like domino counters - have been painted on it in alternating patterns. This canvas was given to me by the wonderful artist and Turner Prize winner, Lubaina Himid CBE. It is one segment of a larger, more extensive work called Cotton.Com that Lubaina made in 2002. The art work consists of about 100 similar anvases to the one I just described, all painted in black and white, with different patterns inspired by 19th century textile sample books. 

Installed in a gallery, the canvases would spread across the wall, while below or across from them is a brass plaque that reads, “He said I looked like a painting by Murillo as I carried water for the hoe gang, just because I balanced the bucket on my head.” This quote is written from the perspective of an enslaved woman, as she goes out to offer water to the enslaved people picking cotton and it was inspired by a description Himid read in Frederick Olmstead’s account of his travels to the US South in the 1850s, just before the beginning of the US civil war. 

The artwork draws quite specifically on two aspects of the trans-atlantic cotton trade: the mobility of cotton and the ways the trade connected different people and places within a global capitalist network, particularly enslaved people in the United States and cotton factory operatives in Lancashire, England – a region known as Cottonopolis in the 19th centuy. 

The artwork foregrounds its close connection to these histories, but it also uses cotton as an archive – each canvas stands in for the transatlantic journey of cotton as it moved from plantation to factory, which she imagines to be like a form of communication – hence the title which alludes to digital communications. Lubaina describes how she speculated that pieces of hair, or skin or blood may have clung to the cotton, physically bringing the live of enslaved people and white workers into contact. The black and white paint on each canvas stands in for these moments of physical interaction. She is also references the actual passage of letters from abolitionist factory operatives in the UK who wrote to Abraham Lincoln in support of the Emancipation Proclamation. What I found in researching this work was that abolitionists, particularly Black abolitionists, also used cotton to make these connections, to emphasize how transatlantic slavery underpinned the social and economic structures of British and North American society, and to call for its abolition. I began to see how cotton was not only a central commodity in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world, it also had important ideological significance, as a material whose use and representation could frame meanings about the value of people and their labour. 

Lubaina’s work is central to my book Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World, in which I use cotton – its trade and its centrality to slavery and colonialism – to consider how art, commerce and colonialism were intertwined in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. I trace cotton’s movement between the US, the UK and later West Africa to consider its relationship to constructions of race and geography, to forms of value and to meanings of vision and visuality. As with Cotton.com I pay close attention to the forms of cotton that moved between places and how cotton materially influenced meanings and values about Blackness, and Black people as resources. As Frederick Douglass liked to remind his audiences, when the price of cotton rose, so too did the value of an enslaved person. Returning to Cotton.com, remember I mentioned how Lubaina includes a quote about a young woman, who is imagined only through her labour addressing the commodification of Black life in slavery. In my book too I explore this relationship of commodification to suggest how it became part of the way Black people are visualized in the nineteenth century, and still today. While the book is based in the 19th century through cases studies, it also uses the work of contemporary artists like Lubaina Himid and Hank Willis Thomas, I also focus on how Black communities, artists and intellectuals dismantle these white supremacist frameworks, and create other ways of seeing and valuing each other that can redesign how we interact today. 

Sky Michael Johnston:

As you heard, Dr. Arabindan-Kesson is the author of Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World which was just published this year by Duke University Press. It is available in paperback. Please see the link in the episode description for more information about the book.

We’ve already had three other remarkable stories about Journeys this season. Please listen to those if you haven’t yet and come back every Monday for another “little story with BIG historical significance.”