The Textile Reader

(Hardback, 2nd edition)

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Addressing textiles as a distinctive area of cultural practice and field of scholarly research, The Textile Reader introduces students to the key issues essential to the exploration of the textile from both a critical and a creative perspective. The second edition brings together lectures, catalogue essays, academic articles, fiction and poetry, as well as several articles available in English translation for the first time, to capture the diversity of voices informing textile studies today. Content is organized around the themes of touch, memory, structure, politics, and production plus a new section exploring the role of community. With 22 new contributors, this revised edition includes selected work from Maria Fusco, Ursula le Guin, Elaine Igoe, Faith Ringgold, and T'ai Smith. Extended introductions and annotated suggestions for further reading by the editor Jessica Hemmings make the second edition an invaluable resource to students of textiles, craft and material culture.

Reviews

This Reader is not merely a collection, but more of an interrogation that speaks from the past to the future. With this in mind, The Textile Reader is not a page turner, but a constant companion, a new friend that has been there and done that, and thus offers the reader a platform from which to consider and develop the future of the discipline. -- Textile History (of the 1st edition)
[T]he pieces are well chosen: they read as though they were selected because someone likes them and finds them interesting, and this gives the selection personality and integrity ... Its greatest value is, however, in its general sense of opening out the genres and the way in which it creates a space for different types of writing on textiles to be considered on an equal footing. -- The Journal of Modern Craft (of the 1st edition)
Will undoubtedly become a key resource for all those interested in considering the location of textile practice, but also for those who seek to understand and challenge textile practice's perceived inferiority as a mode of practice. -- Embroidery Magazine (of the 1st edition)
An ideal foundational text to give an overview of the broad field of Textile Research. It allows students access to a range of themes and key authors in the field which can then be researched in more depth. -- Dr Fiona Curran, Royal College of Art, UK (of the 1st edition)
Evocative, expansive, and enchanting. Hemmings weaves together essays, poems, and literary gems that reveal the nuanced, complex, curious, intimate and political touchpoints of textiles in our lives for a more inclusive, affective reading of our world. I recommend this brilliant anthology to creative scholars, enquiring readers, and knitters, weavers, makers, designers and textile artists worldwide. - Dr Erica de Greef, Co-Director, African Fashion Research Institute, South Africa
The Textile Reader is an essential companion to anyone studying, researching or critically thinking about textiles. Compelling new essays, wider geographies and a greater diversity of voices bring added depth and richness to this distinctive anthology. The excerpts from novels, short stories and poetry within each thematic section, hold the attention and are reminders of the potential power of textiles to speak both cross-culturally and transnationally. - Dr Christine Checinska, Senior Curator, V&A Museum

Author Bio

Jessica Hemmings is Professor of Craft at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is Visiting Professor with the Doctoral School of Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, Hungary (2022), the Rita Bolland Fellow at the Research Centre for Material Culture, the Netherlands (20202023 and a member of the editorial boards of Textile: The Journal of Cloth & Culture and Craft Research. Jessica is the author of Yvonne Vera: the Voice of Cloth (2008), Warp & Weft (Bloomsbury, 2012), and the editor of In the Loop: Knitting Now (2012) and Cultural Threads (Bloomsbury, 2014).