andrewwelsby

I’ve recently started stitching fabric together to make large(ish) quilt like assemblages. The road into this originates from my work in the 1990s designing natural rubber latex garments for the DIY Acid House scene. Inspired by Vivienne Westwood’s post-punk, DIY fashion ethos, this practice reinterpreted fetish aesthetics as a form of countercultural resistance to the conservative policies of the Thatcher era.

The second inspiration for the experiments in quilt making come from a slightly more recent, and thoroughly academic interest in postcolonial theory (see some of the other posts on this site for more info about identity and postcolonialism). I came across firstly the quilts of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. And secondly, the encoded navigation system of the Underground Railroad. This system used recognisable visual motifs stitched on to quilts, hung out to dry on washing lines and on the fences of homes and cabins, to instruct runaway slaves in the 1800s from the southern slave states of the US. The visual instructions, the signs and symbols, allegedly told slaves how to escape north to the free states, and how to evade capture of their journey.

This post however will focus on the first point. I’ll hopefully return to the encoded sign system of the Underground Railroad later. Instead, this analysis will firstly focus on a general postcolonial analysis of the Gee’s Bend quilts. It will then ask how we can use the Postcolonial thinkers, Homi Bhabha, then Gayatri Spivak, and lastly Franz Fanon to help with a deeper understanding of the Gee’s Bend quilts and quilters.

To see some of the quilts from the quilters of Gee’s Bend, click here.

Analysing the quilts of Gee’s Bend from a postcolonial perspective involves exploring how these artworks engage with histories of oppression, resistance, and cultural survival. The African-American women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, are descendants of enslaved people who worked on the Pettway Plantation. Their quilting tradition emerged, and continue to emerge, from a legacy of survival under conditions of economic deprivation and systemic racial oppression, and I believe that they maintain African textile traditions, but in a new context. The improvised, asymmetrical patterns in their work resemble West African textile designs, such as Kente cloth, demonstrating the endurance of some African artistic sensibilities despite colonial displacement. Using a postcolonial lens, the quilts may be viewed as symbols of how marginalised people create community and meaning despite the historical forces of colonialism, forced labour, and segregation.

The quilts are a product of creative labour under economic and social constraints. Postcolonial theorists, such as Homi Bhabha and Edward Said, discuss the ways in which colonised people resist dominant narratives through the use of language and culture, which includes creative expression. The Gee’s Bend quilts can be seen as an act of cultural resistance, or a way for African American women to assert their identity and preserve their traditions outside the structures of white dominance. Unlike Eurocentric quilting traditions, which emphasise symmetry and precision, Gee’s Bend quilts embrace asymmetry and improvisation, reflecting African artistic influences and a rejection of Western aesthetic norms. Many Gee’s Bend women lived in poverty, denied access to formal artistic spaces, and quilted out of necessity often using scraps of fabric for warmth. Yet, their labour, which was historically undervalued, is now recognised in major art institutions.

For decades, the quilting tradition of Gee’s Bend was largely ignored by mainstream art institutions, mirroring postcolonial critiques of how Western art history marginalises non-European artistic traditions. The sudden recognition of Gee’s Bend quilts by the art world in the early 2000s raises questions about the appropriation and commodification of Black cultural expression. Who profits from this recognition? Are the artists themselves benefiting, or is their work being absorbed into institutions that once ignored them? From a postcolonial economic perspective, the women of Gee’s Bend have historically been excluded from mainstream financial and artistic recognition. Even as their quilts gained international fame, questions arose about who controlled their distribution and profits. This situation mirrors broader neocolonial structures in which the labour and creativity of marginalised groups are comodified while they remain economically disenfranchised.

Spivak

Gayatri Spivak’s postcolonial theory offers a powerful framework for analysing the quilts of Gee’s Bend. Spivak’s famous essay, Can the Subaltern Speak?, questions whether marginalised people, especially colonised women, can truly have a voice in historical narratives when colonising powers seek to strip or alter cultures, language and therefore identity.

The Gee’s Bend quilters, as poor Black women in the rural American South, fit Spivak’s definition of the subaltern—a group doubly marginalised by race, gender, and class. Additionally, their artistic labour was historically ignored or dismissed as folk craft rather than recognised as high art, reinforcing their exclusion from dominant cultural and economic structures. Indeed, even when their quilts gained recognition in the art world, their agency in controlling their own narratives and economic gains remained limited—raising the question of whether they were truly being heard or whether their work was being co-opted by elite institutions.

Spivak goes on to argue that epistemic violence, which relates to  knowledge or knowing, occurs when the knowledge systems of marginalised groups are erased or distorted by dominant narratives, often leaving only a trace, or palimpsest of cultural knowledge. The Gee’s Bend quilting tradition is an alternative epistemology—a unique way of knowing, creating, and preserving history outside of Western, patriarchal, and capitalist structures. For decades, these women’s artistic contributions were largely invisible in mainstream art history, reflecting an epistemic erasure of Black women’s creative labour. Even when their quilts were later recognised as modernist art, some critics framed them in Eurocentric terms, comparing them to the works of artists like Matisse or Paul Klee, rather than acknowledging their African diasporic roots and independent aesthetic traditions (this despite some of the quilts pre-dating the modern art references thrust upon them).

Spivak introduces her readers to strategic essentialism, which as a political tactic where marginalised groups temporarily emphasise a shared identity to gain visibility and agency, and safety in community. The quilters of Gee’s Bend have sometimes been represented as a cohesive, collective identity—a community of Black women maintaining an unbroken folk tradition. While this framing has helped bring attention to their work, I believe it risks simplifying their individual artistic voices and experiences, reducing them to an essentialised image of ‘authentic Black folk artists’. I think Spivak would both recognise the power of collective identity in resisting marginalisation while also questioning whether that identity is being shaped by external forces for commercial or institutional gain.

Spivak critiques how elite intellectuals and institutions often speak for the subaltern rather than allowing them to speak for themselves. A problem Edward Said also points to in his book Oientalism. In the case of Gee’s Bend, art critics, museum curators, and collectors have often framed their work through their own lenses, sometimes reinforcing stereotypes of Black women as ‘natural’ artists rather than recognising their conscious aesthetic choices and innovations. This raises ethical questions: Who is telling the quilters’ story? Who profits from their work? Are their authentic voices given space to be heard or are they being represented in ways that serve dominant cultural and economic interests?

Bhabha

By considering the Gee’s Bend quilts through Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial theory, insights can be gained into how they function as sites of hybridity, cultural negotiation, and resistance. Bhabha’s key concepts—hybridity, mimicry, the third space, and liminality—can show how the quilts disrupt strict artistic and cultural categories that are supported by the canon and ideology.

Bhabha’s idea of hybridity refers to the mixing of cultural forms that emerge from colonial encounters. Rather than being purely African or Western, hybrid cultural expressions disrupt binary opposition between coloniser and colonised, often occupying an interstitial space.The Gee’s Bend quilts are an example of this, blending West African textile traditions (such as strip-weaving and improvisation) with Western quilting practices. Unlike European quilting, which emphasises symmetry and rigid patterns, Gee’s Bend quilts embrace asymmetry, bold colours, and abstraction, reflecting an African diasporic aesthetic transformed within the American South. This hybrid form resists the dominant artistic hierarchy that privileges European and white American art, showing how Black women are able to create new visual languages outside Western canonical traditions.

Bhabha’s Third Space is a site where cultural interaction produces something new—neither wholly coloniser nor wholly colonised, but a radical reimagining of both. The Gee’s Bend quilts exist within this Third Space, challenging conventional definitions of both high art and folk craft. They blur the boundaries between what is considered art/ craft, modernist abstraction/ vernacular tradition, Euro-American/ African diasporic aesthetics. Their presence in museums and galleries disrupts traditional Western art history and values, forcing institutions to acknowledge Black women’s artistic contributions in a space that historically excluded them.

Bhabha’s concept of mimicry describes how the colonised adopt and adapt elements of the coloniser’s culture, but in a way that subverts its authority. The Gee’s Bend quilters use a Euro-American quilting tradition, but they do not simply copy it. Instead, they transform it through improvisation, irregular patterns, and bold asymmetry. This act of “almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha’s definition of mimicry) makes the quilts both recognisable and disruptive, unsettling dominant expectations of how quilts should look. Their resemblance to modernist abstract art—but created outside elite artistic spaces—further challenges the idea that modernism is a purely white, male European invention.

Bhabha’s idea of liminality refers to being in an in-between state—neither fully one thing nor another. The Gee’s Bend quilts exist in a liminal space because they’re neither blankets or art. Are they preserving African art traditions, and it functionality, because don’t forget tht we cant use western notions of art to describe the value of African art given that it almost always comes with a function, even if that is as a storytelling device. Or are the quilts innovative and pioneering? Liminality extends to the quilters being simultaneously overlooked, while being recognised by some from the art world (probably white people). This liminality allows the quilts to act as a site of negotiation, where Black women’s creative labour is redefined in ways that resist fixed categories.

Bhabha’s concept of the unhomely describes how colonial subjects experience home as a site of both familiarity and alienation due to historical displacement. The quilters of Gee’s Bend are descendants of enslaved Africans, whose forced displacement disrupted ancestral connections. Their quilts function as acts of re-homing, stitching together a cultural memory that reconnects them to African artistic traditions while affirming their place in America. The quilts also reclaim agency over domestic space, historically a site of oppression for Black women, by turning the act of quilting into both an artistic and economic form of empowerment.

From a Bhabha-inspired perspective, the Gee’s Bend quilts are not just artifacts of African American heritage; they are postcolonial works that disrupt dominant artistic, cultural, and historical narratives. They create a Third Space where Black women redefine art on their own terms, using hybridity, mimicry, and liminality to challenge the structures that historically erased them. Rather than fitting neatly into Western art categories, the quilts remain fluid, resistant, and subversive.

Fanon

Analysing the quilts of Gee’s Bend through Franz Fanon’s postcolonial theory highlights themes of decolonisation, racial identity, labour, and resistance. Fanon’s ideas, particularly from Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, offer insights into how the quilts function as acts of cultural survival, economic resistance, and psychological decolonisation.

Fanon argues that colonialism psychologically and materially dehumanises the colonised, stripping them of their agency and reducing them to labourers for the benefit of the coloniser. For Fanon, true decolonisation is not just political independence, but it requires cultural and psychological reclamation. As already shown, the Gee’s Bend quilters are descendants of enslaved people who, for generations, were denied economic independence and artistic recognition. Their quilts, made from discarded fabric, represent a radical act of reclaiming agency—turning scraps from an oppressive system into objects of beauty and arguably a type of self-expression. This transformation of waste into value is a form of material and cultural decolonisation, resisting the structures that sought to erase Black creativity.

In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon critiques how capitalism and colonialism extract labour from the colonised without granting them economic autonomy. The Gee’s Bend women, historically, lived in conditions of economic dispossession, excluded from the benefits of their labour. Even as their quilts gained recognition in museums, questions arose about who controlled their profits and representation—a dynamic that echoes Fanon’s critique of neocolonial exploitation. Their struggle for financial independence aligns with Fanon’s view that true liberation is not just cultural but economic—requiring access to wealth and resources beyond symbolic recognition.

Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks explores the psychological effects of racism, arguing that colonised people are conditioned to see themselves through the gaze of the oppressor. The quilters of Gee’s Bend, living in a segregated and historically racist society, were often excluded from the dominant art world. The reframing of their work as modernist by white art institutions reflects a Fanonian paradox. Black artists are only validated when their work is compared to European traditions (e.g., their quilts being likened to the works of Paul Klee or abstract expressionists). However, the quilters themselves resist this imposed gaze by continuing their traditions on their own terms, asserting that their artistry does not need white validation to have meaning.

Fanon argues that colonised people must resist their oppression, sometimes violently, to reclaim their identity. While the Gee’s Bend quilts are nonviolent expressions, they embody a form of soft resistance. By creating art outside of dominant structures, the quilters challenge Western artistic hierarchies that historically excluded Black women. Their work exists outside the capitalist logic of mass production, resisting the commodification of labour in a way that Fanon might view as a small but significant act of defiance. Their economic autonomy, gained through cooperative quilting initiatives, mirrors Fanon’s vision of a liberated, self-sufficient community that rejects dependence on oppressive systems.

Fanon believed that decolonisation was about creating a new humanism, like Bhabha, one that rejects the binaries of coloniser/colonised and instead envisions a liberated future. The Gee’s Bend quilts, with their improvisational styles, tell stories of survival, community, and hope, offering a vision of a world where Black artistic traditions are valued as inherently meaningful, not just as derivative of Western art. Their continued creation and recognition represent a shift toward Fanon’s decolonial dream, where Black creativity is acknowledged on its own terms.

From a Fanonian perspective, the quilts of Gee’s Bend are more than textiles. They are acts of psychological decolonisation, economic resistance, and cultural assertion. They disrupt the historical narrative that devalues Black labour and creativity, showing that true liberation is not just about survival but about reclaiming the power to create, define, and control one’s own artistic and economic destiny.

From a postcolonial perspective, the quilts of Gee’s Bend are more than just textiles—they are acts of resistance, cultural memory, and historical testimony. They challenge art historical hierarchies, reclaim African American artistic agency, and demonstrate how creativity can persist in the face of systemic oppression. Analysing the quilts of Gee’s Bend from a postcolonial perspective involves examining how these textiles reflect histories of oppression, resistance, cultural survival, and agency in the aftermath of colonialism and slavery. The quilts, created by African American women in the isolated community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, carry deep historical and cultural significance that can align with key postcolonial themes.

Refs

Bhabha, B. (2004) The location of culture. Routledge, UK.

Fanon, F. (2021). Black skin, white masks. Penguin, UK.

Fanon, F. (2001). The wretched of the earth. Penguin, UK.

Sherwin, S. (2023). ‘A stitch in time: The enduring influence of the Gee’s Bend Quilters’ [online] The Guardian, Thu 26 Jan 2023. Available: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/jan/26/the-new-bend-gees-bend-quilters (accessed: Mar 2 2025).

Spivak, G (2010). Can the subaltern speak? Columbia, USA.

Unknown. (unknown). http://www.soulsgrowndeep.org (accessed: Feb 02 2025).