Made for European Trade by Prisoners in Java: Batik Production in the Women’s Prisons of Semarang and Yogyakarta in the Early Twentieth Century
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The Wereldmuseum, Amsterdam, holds a group of batik textiles that include book covers, a tea cosy, a handkerchief and head wraps. Matched to strikingly similar batik textiles held in the Smithsonian Institute collection, these items can be attributed to the prison labor of women during Dutch colonial rule of the Indonesian island of Java in the early decades of the twentieth century. By uncovering the circumstances of the labor which made these particular textiles it has been possible to recover evidence of incarcerated women’s sharing of textile knowledge acquired before incarceration, recognize that even from the perspective of the Dutch colonial government at least one carceral batik workshop was not solely a venture in profit-making, and trace acknowledgement both by colonial officials and the women incarcerated of the not-to-be-underestimated skills necessary to produce batik.
Source: The Journal of Modern Craft
Author: Jessica Hemmings
Institution: University of Gothenburg
Language: English
Topic: Crafts, Textile, and Design
Subfield: Museology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Funder: Vetenskapsrådet
OpenAlex ID: W4416300279
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