Tornasol Techniques as Cultural Memory

Abstract

<p class="first" id="d7020865e113">This chapter challenges traditional interpretations of the shimmering effects of Andean colonial cloth that are widely considered to result from the introduction of Asian silks to the New World. Instead, such techniques illustrate a much longer-term regional strategy concerned with cultural continuity, subjectivity, and memory, through the material replication of ancestral knowledge. Early modern shimmering Andean textiles, this chapter argues, materialised indigenous cultural memory, persistence, and resistance, and the making of indigenous communal identities in a changing world. The colonial setting opened up a liminal space in which the material articulation of these pre-colonial cultural continuities became a crucial element of identification, memory, and identity.