This article explores what it meant for us (the authors) to work with decolonial debates and approaches within the teaching of fashion history. By reflecting on the ways we live our politics, not only in our teaching but also in the writing of this journal article, our aim is not to model ideal course structures or decolonial techniques, but more to argue for the importance of shifts in consciousness as the single most important strategy. For it is in the transparency and positionality of our practices as teachers and writers -including a carefully negotiated resistance to and compliance with the expected structures of teaching and writing -that we suggest what a decolonial praxis could entail and what its value might be, together with the potential longer term impacts of decolonising the curriculum.There are many highly dedicated and inspiring educators who want to see a broader curriculum and who want to respond to current debates around decolonising cultural institutions. This goal, as direct as it sounds, is an impossibility without deeper systemic changes to behaviours, expectations, habits and value systems. In the face of this, how can any one person make a difference on their own? And, more profoundly, can any changes be accomplished to allow individuals to teach from the
Chinese embroideries have featured in British domestic interiors since at least the seventeenth century. However, Western imperial interests in China during the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created a particular set of meanings around Chinese material culture, and especially a colonial form of nostalgia for pre-nineteenth-century China, with its emperors and 'exotic' court etiquette. This article examines the use of Chinese satin-stitch embroideries in British homes between 1860 and 1949, and explores how a range of British identities was constructed through the ownership, manipulation and display of these luxury Chinese textiles. IntroductionChinese embroideries have had many decorative uses in British homes, including as table centres, decorative trimming on clothing, and soft furnishings. Traded by sea between China and Europe from the seventeenth century onwards, they could be brand-new export wares or antique and collectible goods. Embroideries and brocades have also been important sources of Chinese imagery in the West, so that books on Chinese art can sometimes be far more evocative of the domestic drawing room than of the museum, revealing the extent to which Eastern imagery has been integrated into Western homes through embroidery. For example, Winifred Reed Tredwell, in Chinese Art Motifs (1915), wrote: 'One of the busiest animals in the world is the Chinese dragon who, when he is not half-way between heaven and earth, spitting fl ames or fi ghting tigers, is kept on the jump, guarding -amongst other things -vases, tea-table covers, tea-napkins, household furniture, and mandarin coats!' 1The aim of this article is to consider how Chinese embroideries have been used to provide an understanding of China in Britain, and how British imperial relationships with China were materially involved in British home-making and the formation of British subjectivities between the end of the Opium Wars in 1860 and the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. The use of Chinese embroideries around respectable and often highly elite British drawing rooms, highlights the processes by which domestic displays of textiles came to play a role within intersecting discourses of gender, class and race, through systems of cultural appropriation. The role of crosscultural consumption within the generation of national identities is rendered all the more pertinent when possession of Chinese material culture becomes so very 'British', especially where a tendency to treat Japanese and Chinese embroideries as interchangeable products is noted. 224 Dragons in the Drawing RoomBooks such as Tredwell's position things from China, especially textiles, at a very gendered point of tension between the 'properly' artistic and the domestically 'trivial'. Moreover, her book was taken seriously enough to be included in a 1935 bibliography of Chinese art by Roger Fry, who considered that the history of European chinoiserie had allowed Chinese art to become 'acclimatized in our drawing-rooms'.2 The legacy of an earlie...
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