ABSTRACT

Since its inception in the early 1930s in the United States, the printed t-shirt has become a dominant feature in our linguistic landscape (Harris, 1996; Lou & Zhang, 2006). However, scholarship of the printed t-shirt has been relatively limited, at least from within the humanities and social sciences. There are some noteworthy exceptions, including an exchange between Homi Bhabha and James Clifford in which Bhabha described the high frequency of Harvard t-shirts in Bombay as a kind of “fetishization of other cultures, of the elsewhere, or of the image or figure of travel” (Bhabha in Grosberg, Nelson & Treichle, 1992, 114). Around a similar time, Barmé (1993) reported on the production, consumption and subsequent ban of politically motivated printed t-shirts in Beijing by artist Kong Yongqian.