Threading Postsocialist, Postcolonial, and Decolonial Intersections in Hybrid Spaces: Selected Women’s Textile Creations Across the Czech and Slovak Borders
Abstract
The article combines postcolonial and decolonial theories in an intersectional gender analyses of a selection of socialist and postsocialist textile artifacts by women. The shared traits of the discussed artifacts originate in the hybrid position of Czecho-Slovak socialist and postsocialist context, in the marginalized position of textiles in art disciplines including their association with femininity, and finally in the fact that the creative makers' names remain unknown and/or expropriated within the said creative projects.
The article uses Bhabha's postcolonial concept of hybridity to point out inherent contradictions and ambivalences in socialist and postsocialist women's textile creativity. By drawing on Tlostanova, it further demonstrates the relevance of decolonial thought for creative and art production in postsocialist societies that navigate the cooptation and extraction of creative labor by both the socialist economic system as well as the market economy following the post-Cold War economic transformation.
While socialist Domácí umění tapestries convey representations of the exoticized and racialized Other simultaneously with the socialist subjects' desire for the freedom of movement and travel, the postsocialist example of creativity (a crocheted statistical graph titled When Labour Becomes Form) communicates harsh criticism of patriarchal and ageist bias by unintentionally, but unavoidably, reiterating patriarchal and especially capitalist patterns of extraction of vulnerable labor and creativity. The article thus points to difficulties in forging counterhegemonic resistance in such forms of creativity that entail femininity, textiles, and (post)socialist historical circumstances.