Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses upon the disintegrating material culture of a dying weaving industry in south India. Investigating the strategies of local actors to make the rotting ruins (in)visible, it asks whether their abandonment to the fecund tropical landscape permits a new form of productivity to emerge?

Paper long abstract:

The tropical monsoon landscape is littered with dilapidated factories. Ruins containing rotting looms, still strung with saggy warps and wefts now interlaced with giant cobwebs, suckered creepers and suspended electrical cables. Handloom production in north Kerala has been geared to the export of furnishing materials since its industrialization in the mid-19th C. However, WTO deregulation, competition from the mechanized sectors in India and China combined with problematic local labour relations is making export difficult. Choking cotton dust, salty wastewater and dye run-offs were once polluting by-products yet also visible signs of (un)healthy production; now it is the means of production that have lost value, overgrown remains amongst the fecund landscape.

To whom are these ruins visible and in what contexts - how do they appear to have been made (in)visible through the various strategies of local weavers, entrepreneurial merchant-exporters, reforming communists, entrenched trade unions and government bureaucrats? The actors involved are as entangled and confused as the threads on the loom engulfed by nature. Sifting through inter-woven materialities, imageries, oral histories and local politics associated with the fate of weaving reveals the extraordinarily complex webs of social relations arising out of the production and sale of textiles in the area. The paper will question whether these remainders are just the unproductive 'waste' of a dead or dying industry or have they been sacrificed for the emergence of new productive relationships?