Kutesko, Elizabeth (2024) Transnational Fashion on the Frontier: Migration and Modernities in the Brazilian Amazon. In: Global Dress and Migration in History, 29-30 November 2024, Online.
Type of Research: | Conference, Symposium or Workshop Item |
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Creators: | Kutesko, Elizabeth |
Description: | In 1910, on the cusp of the rubber fever that gripped South America, New York photographer Dana Merrill was hired to document the transnational construction of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad, built deep in the Brazilian Amazon. His camera acted both as witness to, and abettor in, this imperial project of US capitalist expansion and exploitation of South America. Although Merrill was not employed to document the transnational clothing culture of the transient frontier society that sprang up around the construction of the railroad, his commissioned photographs overflow with visual information on dress: what people wore, and how they wore it, documented in extraordinary detail. Turning to fashion offers a revised lens into how Merrill’s predominantly male subjects, who had journeyed to the Amazon from over 52 nations, used clothing to construct their identities and position themselves in relation to one another in the remote and uninviting location. Merrill’s archive provides an unusual case study for the historian to critically evaluate the colonial and neocolonial devaluation of labour upon which early-twentieth century projects of industrial modernity such as the Madeira-Mamoré railroad were predicated. In bridging the visual and sensory aspects of fashion – by bringing photographs together with physical items of clothing, as well as poetry, diaries and memoirs – this paper proposes a method to overcome the absences that underpin Merrill’s archive. Grounded in the visual analysis of fashion, it builds upon feminist philosopher Saidiya Hartman’s revisionist method of ‘critical fabulation’, which deviates from traditional historiography in its efforts to overcome significant acts of erasure within the historical record. Merrill’s photographs constitute an unexplored primary source through which to investigate the very nature of fashion beyond the epistemological frontiers of the ‘West’, by using dress as a method to reconstruct the undocumented lives of commodified migrant labour who coalesced on the Madeira-Mamoré railroad. |
Official Website: | https://le.ac.uk/research/projects/global-dress-and-migration-in-history |
Your affiliations with UAL: | Colleges > Central Saint Martins |
Date: | 29 November 2024 |
Event Location: | Online |
Date Deposited: | 15 Jan 2025 10:15 |
Last Modified: | 15 Jan 2025 10:15 |
Item ID: | 23274 |
URI: | https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/23274 |
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