The Fabric of Home

This essay focuses on the ways in which a humble piece of cotton cloth reconfigured the idea of the object as such, into one characterized, dually, by its own making process and by its orientation towards the unforeseeable use. The essay engages two distinct modernist artistic utterances that articulated, and bore witness to, this changed relationship towards objects and links them to an effort to rearticulate the affect of home in modernism. My case studies are the series of drawings Paul Klee executed on cheesecloths in the 1920s-30s, and Varvara Stepanova’s textile designs while at work at the First State Textile Factory in 1924. The essay suggests that both artists, their expressive and ideological dissimilarities notwithstanding, perceived in the piece of cotton cloth a “comrade”—that is, an active, animate participant in the creation process, itself a procedure of metabolizing experience which involves the replication of geometric forms and lines of threaded cotton or burlap. Juxtaposing the textile tremors in Klee’s paintings and Stepanova’s designs unearths a hidden axial point in which the modernists’ perception of home, as a physical environment, projective phantasy and constitutive emotion, changed, and our perception of key experiential categories such as objects and object-making transformed.

Performance of slow sand filters in the after-treatment of effluent from Pernambuco state textile center

Jean laundering generates significant effluent flows with a high organic load, color, and other pollutants, making it difficult to adjust effluent releases within legal limits. Slow Sand Filters (SSF) with downflow were tested for seven days (bench scale), to propose an after-treatment of effluents from an Effluent Treatment Plant of a jean laundry. The research evaluated the removal of the following parameters: color, turbidity, chemical and biochemical oxygen demand, conductivity, ammonia, total phosphorus and salinity of the textile effluent. The experimental apparatus had four SSF: the first filter was fed with distilled water, while the other three filters (triplicates) were fed with effluent. The filters had, on average, the following removal efficiencies: 91% for ammonia, 61.24% color, 89.43% turbidity, and 83.54% for phosphorus. Regarding the removal of organic matter, 98.11% for BOD and 81.17% for COD, demonstrating that SSFs were efficient in removing particulate, dissolved materials and organic matter.

Surface and Substance: Baroque Dress in Spain and France, 1600–1720

This article explores the surface and substance of elite dress in the baroque period by unpacking printed texts and images that reveal their political and economic significance in the courts of Europe. It does so by considering the nature and sources of garments and fabrics, continuity and change in their production and consumption in Spain and France, and the shaping of the modern fashion system—a system in which changes in textiles and trimmings were promoted seasonally by the state, textile manufacturers, and the nascent fashion press (Le Mercure galant) from the late seventeenth century onward. It thus underlines the local and global networks involved in the production and consumption of dress.

The State Connection in China's Rural-Urban Migration

This study explores the role of China's rural local state-owned and urban state-owned units in its rural-urban migration process. Most studies on Chinese migration have focused on migrants moving from rural to urban areas through informal mechanisms outside of the state's control. They therefore treat the Chinese state as an obstructionist force and dismiss its facilitative role in the migration process. By documenting rural local states' “labor export” strategies and urban state units' employment of millions of peasants, this article provides a corrective to the existing literature. It highlights and explains the state connection in China's rural-urban migration. Labor is … a special kind of commodity. What we do is to fetch a good price for this special commodity. Labor bureau official from Laomei county, 1996 If we want efficiency, we have to hire migrant workers. Party secretary of a state textile factory in Shanghai, 1997