Locating the Madras Kerchief in Global Textile Trade: Convergences Between Connecting Threads and the Dutch Textile Trade Project

Abstract

This essay presents collaborative research related to the National Endowment for the Humanities-Arts and Humanities Research Council grant-funded project Connecting Threads, a website that brings together academics and curators across the United Kingdom and the United States who seek to contribute to wider decolonization work in the humanities and engage communities whose contributions to global cultures of textiles and fashion have historically been ignored. The Connecting Threads research team uses the Dutch Textile Trade Project’s data and web applications to deepen understanding of the Madras kerchief, a large checked cotton square cloth that circulated in Afro-diasporic communities in the Caribbean during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.