Silk

Abstract

Abstract Histories of silk cultivation can project impressions that regard failures as anomalous, but particular failings can have historical significance nonetheless. Individual histories of sericulture of different eras and across the globe alone cannot explain the conditions of failure in sericulture. This essay shows how repeated human efforts to grow silk are important aspects of the history of sericulture. Sericulture situated in nineteenth- and twentieth-century California—an area with a history famed for agricultural production but not for silk—provides a geographic middle ground where silkworms, mulberry, and expertise from East Asia and Europe came together. Moreover, the histories of plants and insects in the seri-histories of North, South, and Meso-American gather to a point in California to illuminate the integrality of diverse roles of women that factored into the business and technics of making silk and caring for the larvae of the silk moth (including the boiling of cocoons and reeling their silk filaments together). Across racial lines, women’s practical attempts at and decisions about silk cultivation provides a useful counterbalance to scholarly explorations of the histories of establishing sericulture nested within the discourse of internationalization. By examining the challenges and failures of silk production critically, a better understanding of the common threads that knit these disparate stories together comes into view. These sericultural initiatives of the New World ultimately contextualize the typicality of non-continuity in the making of silk threads.