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Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity
Duke University Press
October 2009
On Sale: October 1, 2009
408 pages ISBN: 0822346036 EAN: 9780822346036 Kindle: B00428MFUE Paperback / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Slaves to Fashion is a pioneering cultural history of
the black dandy, from his emergence in Enlightenment England
to his contemporary incarnations in the cosmopolitan art
worlds of London and New York. It is populated by sartorial
impresarios such as Julius Soubise, a freed slave who
sometimes wore diamond-buckled, red-heeled shoes as he
circulated through the social scene of eighteenth-century
London, and Yinka Shonibare, a prominent Afro-British artist
who not only styles himself as a fop but also creates ironic
commentaries on black dandyism in his work. Interpreting
performances and representations of black dandyism in
particular cultural settings and literary and visual texts,
Monica L. Miller emphasizes the importance of sartorial
style to black identity formation in the Atlantic
diaspora. Dandyism was initially imposed on black
men in eighteenth-century England, as the Atlantic slave
trade and an emerging culture of conspicuous consumption
generated a vogue in dandified black servants. “Luxury
slaves” tweaked and reworked their uniforms, and were soon
known for their sartorial novelty and sometimes flamboyant
personalities. Tracing the history of the black dandy
forward to contemporary celebrity incarnations such as Andre
3000 and Sean Combs, Miller explains how black people became
arbiters of style and how they have historically used the
dandy’s signature tools—clothing, gesture, and wit—to break
down limiting identity markers and propose new ways of
fashioning political and social possibility in the black
Atlantic world. With an aplomb worthy of her iconographic
subject, she considers the black dandy in relation to
nineteenth-century American literature and drama, W. E. B.
Du Bois’s reflections on black masculinity and cultural
nationalism, the modernist aesthetics of the Harlem
Renaissance, and representations of black cosmopolitanism in
contemporary visual art.
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