8 - Reimaging and Reimagining an Absent-Presence in Cotton.com (2003)

Summary

The global, historical importance of cotton is key to Himid's signature work Cotton.com, which she made as part of the show Fabrications at Cube gallery, a former textile mill in central Manchester in 2002. Himid teases out its multiple implications to tell local and global stories that rebound backwards and forwards across time and geographies implicating populations from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe in local spaces and global networks that promote complex narratives around race, ethnicity, gender, class and nation. In this, her art relates directly to the concerns of key thinkers in Black British cultural criticism such as Stuart Hall, whose engagement with globalisation demanded neither uneasy acquiescence nor blind opposition, but rather a contemplative ambivalence which could create interesting philosophical and artistic articulations. He describes how

globalisation must never be read as a simple process of cultural homogenisation; it is always an articulation of the local, of the specific and the global. Therefore, there will always be specificities – of voices, of positioning, of identity, of cultural traditions, of histories, and these are the conditions of enunciation which allow us to speak. We speak with distinctive voices; but we speak with the logic of a cultural-global, which opens a conversation between us, which would not have been possible otherwise.

Cotton.com speaks to the ‘local, the specific and the global’ and to globalisation and local histories both in the past and the present. Sven Beckert, in his seminal history of the trade, Empire of Cotton: A Global History, outlines the way that cotton more than any other commodity tied together the world in an interlinked network of commerce. As he states, ‘sugar and tobacco did not create industrial proletariats in Europe. Cotton did’. These industrial proletariats were part of a wholly new globalised network, as Beckert explains:

European trade in cotton textiles tied together Asia, the Americas, Africa and Europe in a complex commercial web. Never before in the four millennia history of cotton had such a globe-spanning system been invented. Never before had the products of Indian weaving paid for slaves in Africa to work on the plantations in Americas to produce agricultural commodities for European consumers … What was the most radical was not the particulars of the trade, but the system in which they were embedded and how different parts of the system fed upon one another.