Harriet Powers’ Bible Quilts and the Invention of an African-Centered Quilt History

In this paper I examine Harriet Powers’ two iconic bible quilts, perhaps the best-known objects in the canon of African-American art.  In the last three decades of the 20th century, these late 19th century objects underwent, in Igor Kopytoff’s words, a process of ‘singularization’, that elevated them to a level of cultural sacredness. The specious link that scholars forged between these quilts and a supposed Dahomean ancestry gave them cultural capital as prime exemplars of the essentialist persistence of an African aesthetic in an African-American world. That unexamined claim to a talismanic ‘Africanness’ has been disseminated throughout American popular culture, despite the fact that everything we know about 19th century American quilts and their histories suggests a  quintessential Americanness to these objects.  In Hobsbawm’s famous phrase, this ‘invention of tradition,’ is not a process unique to these objects, nor to the African American experience. Rather, it is a phenomenon that plays out repeatedly in the history of objects and cultural phenomena, usually at a point in time when outmoded identities are being cast off and new ones claimed.