Tracing Empire: Drawing, Design, and Colonial Knowledge in H.R. Mallinson & Co's 'American Indian Series'

This paper analyzes a series of as-of-yet unexamined preparatory drawings for the "American Indian Series," a collection of over 25 silks released by New York textile designer H.R. Mallinson & Co. in 1928 that featured the arts and handicrafts of North America's indigenous nations. Based on the close observation of specific objects in New York's ethnological and ethnographic collections, the series was but one manifestation of a larger project of interwar cultural nationalism, in which designers were encouraged to turn away from European motifs and towards themes understood to be "endemic" to the United States. This paper builds off existing scholarship that has considered the role of "playing Indian" in perpetuating colonial violence to argue that not only did the finished Mallinson silks, when incorporated into clothing for Anglo-American consumers, represent a watered-down and subtle form of "playing Indian," but that the very processes of drawing used to create those silks performed that same violence. Identifying three nexuses in which one can observe an uncanny congruence between the visual processes of industrial design and those of colonial knowledge production--collecting/curating, archeology, and land surveying--I argue that by examining visual operations of abstraction and schematization, the very operations needed to extract singular objects and transform them into mass-reproducible motifs, one can also understand the visual mechanisms through which actual land dispossession took place. More broadly, this paper attempts to articulate how processes of design, even those seemingly removed from the world of governmental policy, not only represented but also performed colonial work.