Textile Resistance and Platformed Aesthetics: Gendered Visual Memory, Extractive Histories, and Media Logics in the Niger Delta

Abstract

Cloth has long preserved the memory and political speech of women in Nigeria's Niger Delta, yet the scholarship that could explain this has developed in three separate fields: studies of oil extraction, which approach the region through political economy, protest and literary ecocriticism; studies of textile memory and craftivism, concentrated on Latin American, European and North American cases; and platform studies, which theorise visibility largely from North Atlantic material. This conceptual article brings the three into one frame. Drawing on an integrative review of literature identified through twenty structured database searches and targeted searches of art-historical, anthropological and media-studies sources, it reads Kalabari cut-thread cloth (pelete bite), the lineage cloth box and the women's protests of 1984–2003 alongside research on algorithmic visibility, content moderation, data colonialism and generative image models. The article proposes the concept of subtractive authorship to describe how Delta women have re-authored imported cloth by removal. It argues that platform media logics strip the provenance and use on which this cloth's memory depends, make ornamental cloth highly visible while rendering protest cloth and the protesting body difficult to see, and impose an attention tempo at odds with the slow violence the cloth records. It further argues that oil extraction and platform data relations should be compared structurally without being treated as equivalent. It also considers how the entrepreneurial, material and sensing textile framings found in current Nigerian craft research bear on this argument. The article offers five propositions and a research agenda to guide empirical work.