Zimbabwean author and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga’s second novel, The Book of Not (2006), opens with the scene of a severed leg tossed high in the sky: ‘Up, up, up, the leg spun. A piece of a person up there in the sky.’ The limb belongs to Netsai, the younger sister of the novel’s narrator, Tambu, whose injury is the result of a landmine explosion. After falling in love with a comrade, Netsai joined Rhodesia’s protracted guerrilla war that eventually led to the country’s independence from Britain and renaming as Zimbabwe in 1980. Meanwhile, Tambu is one of a few black students at the Young Ladies College of the Sacred Heart, a white school. After the parents of fellow students, the Swanepoels twins, are brutally murdered, the Sisters invite students to ‘join the women knitting comforters and gloves for the troops’. What Tambu fails to realise is that her knitting signals political loyalty in direct conflict with her sister’s participation in a civil war drawn along racial lines.

Tambu’s knitting could not be further from the humanitarian ethics of neutrality and impartiality. Instead, she learns to her great expense that handicraft can be acutely political. In fact, handicraft is often political. Even when, as the editors of this volume suggest, we turn our attention to handicraft’s associations with ‘the quotidian ethics of daily working practice, conditions and consumer choice’, the textile as political remains inescapable. As Julia Bryan- Wilson writes in her extensive survey of the blurring of boundaries between amateur and professional textile making in examples from North and South America from the 1970s to the 1990s, ‘textile politics are frequently double-edged, as disruptive causes can be promulgated by actions or methods that serve a regulatory function to cement normative gender roles as well as nationalist agendas’. [...]