ABSTRACT
This study aims to explore patchwork as a major cultural and rhetorical art form through one of its richest sub-categories, African American quilts. Having long been marginalized or dismissed by American quilt history, quilts have gained status and become, in recent decades, a growing area of interest and scholarly investigation, which continues undiminished. Scholars can use quilts as a material source for writing history, and quilts themselves are a way of recounting everyday issues of historical experience. In this paper, I will consider African American quilts from the perspective of individual, collective, and national memory, and, more broadly, regarding the ways these material objects relate to reading and (re)writing the life and culture of this community, peripheral to the center. I will investigate several forms of expression proper to the tradition of African American patchwork by examining their historical, social, and political implications. From the days of slavery to the contemporary period that saw the Gee’s Bend phenomenon and the birth of the Obama quilts, African American patchwork has been a “recognizable cultural sign,” an artifact “enacting powerful models of cooperation, collaboration and communal making” (Hilliard 1994, 112).
