Postcards of Us: Moroccan Textiles on the Global Market

Abstract

Postcards of Us: Moroccan Textiles on the Global Market explores the experiences of the Women’s Weaving Cooperative of Tarmilat, Morocco as it engages with the global market for artisan crafts. The nature of the global market is that of interconnectedness between producers and consumers who are vastly separated by differences in geography, nationality, language, class, education, culture, and role in the market. “Place: National and Local Contexts” discusses the embeddedness of informal settlements like Tarmilat in local, regional, national, and international power structures, capital flows, and responses to economic globalization. Tarmilat is one of countless communities throughout the world whose informality separates them from the State-sponsored benefits of citizenship, including infrastructural development and protection under the law. This transnational grouping of people is known as the Fourth World. “Power, Dependency, Autonomy” outlines the history of the Women’s Weaving Cooperative in Tarmilat and suggests an analysis of the intertwined nature of charity and dependency in contemporary development initiatives. Charity-as-development generates relationships of dependency between developing communities and sources of First World charity. These relationships of dependency in development initiatives threaten the sustainability of development projects and serve to legitimize the systems of power that many of these initiatives strive to dismantle. “The Work of Weaving” unpacks the local social implications of the Women’s Weaving Cooperative and describes the place of the cooperative in the lives of cooperative members and in the social life of the Tarmilat community. The economic mode of the Women’s Weaving Cooperative represents a counter-hegemonic model for development in a global capitalist system. “Global Contact” analyzes the role of First World consumers in the lived realities of producers in the developing world and describes interactions between the Women’s Weaving Cooperative and tourists who visit Tarmilat. Cooperative members construct an estranged intimacy with a network of tourist visitors and First World consumers. At its conclusion, Postcards of Us approaches a critique of contemporary development discourses and their relationship to hegemonic global capitalism, suggesting revisions to intellectual discussions of development and challenging individuals to think critically about their role in the global market.