Resisting Colonial Fabrications

ecp5

Saturday 14 December 2024

By Jennifer Graley – 4th year

Fabric is intrinsically woven with a thread of deep colonial complexity. These fabrications assemble to form the clothes of the everyday; universally seen as fashions of identity, status, and comfort. As materials of the body, these bound fabrics are inherently built upon histories of oppression, foundations of exploitation and domination. The pursuit of cotton as a global commodity is certainly recognised as a historical source of violence, but not for the unjust colonialities that still manifest themselves in the present. Fast fashion, as the attachment of fabric to capital, is arguably a slow violence that infiltrates through supply chains on a global scale in order to reproduce systems of colonial power in everyday modernity. In an active resistance to these colonial fabrications, there is a pressing need to decentre sustainability narratives in a participatory promotion of Fairtrade – an elevation of voices ‘from the margin’.

We must actively politicise the fabric beneath the thumb. Everything is political, as behind everything there is a personal experience that formulates this politicality. The scope of violence caused by the fast commodities in the garment industry is overwhelming. More than 270,000 Indian cotton farmers have committed suicide since 1995, a major contributing factor to this has been deemed genetically modified cotton forcing poorly paid growers into unmanageable cycles of debt. In 2013, the Rana Plaza building housing Eurocentric fast fashion brands collapsed killing 1,134 people. Media-reported statistics are cycled, but a dissociation to them is actively encouraged. A binary of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ is hence intensely endorsed; a gaping colonial seam is maintained, torn between ‘consumers’ and ‘producers’.

The fast modernity in which we live is consequently a violent one, and this violence is vigorously silenced by its implicit imperialisms. To counter these narratives, we must seek the promotion of a united ‘us’. Within this united collective, however, the voices of the ostracised, the downtrodden, the neglected, must formulate the core of resistance in a subversion of the colonial status quo. Accordingly, garment supply chains must be made visible, and fashion companies as perpetrators of colonial capital must be held accountable. This visibility is a tangible decentring of power within the globalised network of commodity production.

This is an explicit call to consciously reassociate ourselves with the fabrics we wear, to comprehend their implications on the reproduction of global systems of oppression in the present, as well as their capacity for resistance in a sustainable future. The principle of sustainability cannot be achieved without its essential pillar of social justice. As an international platform of equity advocacy in global commodity production, ‘Fairtrade’ has been deemed an essential framework in which these traditional fabric narratives can be subverted. Fairtrade is a self-identifying ‘movement’, a partnership with 2 million farmers and workers across the globe that endeavours to promote more secure and sustainable livelihoods to ensure fair pay, production, and practices.

One may question – why is Fairtrade not the universal standard? What are the obstacles for infiltrating Fairtrade into the normalised requirement of production? The established response to this interrogation is the perpetuated maxim of ‘there is not enough demand’. Despite this, one must consider the silent dynamics that also exist within traditional ‘consumer’ societies themselves. Amidst a cost-of-living crisis, especially within the UK, Fairtrade is deemed controversial as the additional cost of ‘fair’ production is often translated by companies onto increasing prices for the consumers of essential commodities. By its nature, some argue that Fairtrade’s fundamental philosophy risks the promotion of an ‘individualised’ burden. This is certainly valid, and undoubtably more needs to be done to make Fairtrade more accessible, in particular within the UK. But arguably, Fairtrade can also be claimed as a localised structure of activism that opposes everyday violence with everyday action. As a subversive mirror to the global unjust, Fairtrade seeks to establish itself as a method of reasserting the local just.

In this vein of radially unmaking of the ‘traditional’, undeniably we can take this approach to decolonising the constitution of textiles further, pushing colonial boundaries in a rewriting of who produces the fabric of knowledge. Researchers at the University of the Arts London, through the ‘centre for sustainable fashion’, seek to advocate for a new paradigm of cultural sustainability within discourse on global commodity production. Through a partnership with refugee communities in the UK, their participatory action research named ‘Decolonising Fashion and Textiles’ seeks to harness the foundations of localised community resilience in the UK to create a space for Black, Indigenous and other marginalised voices within popularised accounts of production and consumption.

In an increasingly fast materialisation of the present, to actively consider the fabric of the decolonial is to foster the radically sustainable. Resisting conventional narratives of the colonial, seeking to unite and celebrate difference rather than stigmatising is to dynamically create environments in which joy and resistance can thrive. The global webs of production and consumption are therefore intrinsically intertwined with all facets of the intersectional. Fundamentally, Fairtrade is an essential framework that can be expanded upon to formulate a narrative of community-building across the globe. An undertaking of change means to act on the local to hold the global accountable, for we must resist the colonial fabrications that separate us.