Decolonizing Modern Craft

Within current western craft discourses and display logics, a modernist framework remains prevalent in structuring the terms by which craft is situated and considered. Modern craft often places an emphasis on the craftsperson as a singular genius where the notion of the master is inherited from Enlightenment logics that valued individualism over collaboration and collective production. Modernism, in its exaltation of purity and authenticity—the authenticity of materials, the refined purity of design—divorced the crafted object from its geographic specificity, community significance, and social use in order to present it as a finite, fixed, and finished objet d’art. Responding to the drive for innovation and novelty, many professional and amateur craftspeople in the west look to the cultural practices and products of the non-western ‘other’ as a source for inspiration. This is in line with a colonial logic where non-western cultural objects and practices are treated as a resource that western craftspeople feel entitled to extract and exploit by adding them to their ‘tool box’ of designs and techniques.

This round table brings together the current research of three scholars engaged in critically assessing craft production, reception, and discourse spanning the nineteenth century through to the present. Each of the presenters critically interrogates the contemporary discourse of craft where a Modernist framework is often employed as the default. Through a post-colonial critique, the presenters trouble modern craft’s colonial logic of individualism, commodification, and cultural theft and begin to lay the groundwork for a decolonial critique of modern craft.