Fashion & Slavery
Dr. Jonathan Michael Square
9:10 AM - 12:00 PM, Wednesdays
Contact: jonathan.m.square@gmail.com
Course Description
In considering the way the enslaved understood themselves and their place in the world, historians often encounter a dearth of source material. Yet the experience of enslaved Africans and their descendants is not wholly absent from the historical record. One entry point into the experience of the enslaved is how they dressed and adorned themselves. While this could be at the direction of their enslavers, fashion was one of the few arenas in which slaves could exert a modicum of control. Clothing—even supplied clothing—was open to manipulation and interpretation. For slaves, as with all groups, fashion constituted a rich, unique medium for complex cultural elaboration.
This course will explore the politics of fashion among people of African descent during slavery and the period immediately followed emancipation. Course material will cover the African Diaspora in its full complexity, including the United States, Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa itself. We will examine in particular the relationship between consumerism among enslaved people and the development of modern capitalism in the Atlantic World. Other topics of the course will include: sumptuary law, wealth accumulation among the enslaved and formally enslaved, honor and respectability politics, commodification of the enslaved, gendered sartorial expression, etc.
Course Objectives/Learning Goals
By the successful completion of this course, students will be able to:
Deepen their understanding of foundational theories and systemic issues regarding intersections between the institution of slavery and the global fashion industry.
Develop fluency in critical thinking and writing skills that address fashion, race and power in a cogent manner
Develop familiarity with methodologies used in the study of visual and material culture
Recognize and problematize existing practices and design strategies challenging the fashion system today, including cultural appropriation, the reliance on coerced labor, and a host of persistent -isms
Required Texts
Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin: Or, Life among the Lowly
Assignments and Grading
You will be asked to write two 5-page primary source analyses based on visual artifacts that illuminate the connection between fashion and slavery (i.e., reproduction of artwork or an archival image, fabric swatch, article of clothing, a copy of a legal document, etc.). Each primary source analysis is worth 35% of your final grade.
Your primary source analyses should be an intellectual response to any visual artifact that illuminates the connection between fashion and slavery. Strive to write clearly and persuasively. Your writing should make an argument with each sentence and paragraph supporting your central thesis. This is not a research paper. However, be sure to support your claims and analysis with relevant secondary literature. When you quote or refer to specific material from a text, cite it using Chicago style. Expect to be graded more stringently as you learn possible errors in your first primary source analysis.
For the final project, we will curate a pop-up virtual exhibition of these same visual artifacts. During the last class, you will present in a virtual exhibition with which to engage classnates to learn more about the course and the exhibited pieces. Participation in the exhibition will be 15% of your final grade. It’s includes a 10-minute presentation that includes the presentation of two visual artifiacts along with wall text.
Primary source analyses - 35% x 2
Participation in the exhibition -15%
Attendance & participation - 15%
Attendance Policy
The class will be a seminar with high expectations of participation. Please come to class prepared to participate actively in class discussions. Attendance and participation will be worth 15% of your final grade. No student will be allowed more than two excused absences unless extraordinary circumstances present themselves. All absences must be approved by me.
Course Schedule
Date Readings
JANUARY 27
Fashion and Slavery: An Introduction
February 3
The Slave Trade and the Commodification of the Enslaved Body
Stephanie Smallwood, “Turning Atlantic Commodities into American Slaves,” in Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 153-181.
Walter Johnson. “Turning People into Products.” in Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 117-134.
Kim F. Hall. “’An Object in the Midst of Other Objects’: Race, Gender, Material Culture.” in Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 211-253.
February 10
The Exquisite Slave: Wealth Accumulation in the Era of Slavery
George E. Brooks, Jr. “The Signares of St. Louis and Gorée: Women Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth-Century Senegal.” in Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change, edited by Nancy Hafkin, Edna Bay 1976: 19-44.
Zephyr Frank. “Pathways to Wealth in Rio de Janeiro, 1815-1860” and “Death and Dying.” in Dutra’s World: Wealth and Family in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), 96-146.
Tamara Walker. “Legal Status, Gender, and Self-Fashioning.” in Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 43-77.
February 17
Color and Adornment in Beloved
Beloved, film (1998).
Beloved, novel (1987).
February 24
The Myth of the Tignon and the Invention of New Orleans
Jonathan M. Square, “The Myth of the Tignon and the Invention of New Orleans,” work in progress.
“Origin of the Tignon: A Head-Dress Word by the Old Mammy,” The Weekly Picayune, June 18, 1891.
“Record & deliberations of the Cabildo,” 1769-1803, transcripts in English.
March 3
Gendered Sartorial Expression
Silvia Hunold Lara. “The Signs of Color: Women’s Dress and Racial Relations in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, ca. 1750–1815.” Colonial Latin American Review 6.2 (1997): 205-225.
Sally Price and Richard Price. “Cloths and Colors,” in Maroon Arts: Cultural Vitality in the African Diaspora (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 53-127.
Sophie White. “‘Wearing three or four handkerchiefs around his collar, and elsewhere about him’: Slaves’ Constructions of Masculinity and Ethnicity in French Colonial New Orleans.” Gender & History 15.3 (2003): 528-549.
March 10
Fashion and the Politics of Re-dress
Stephanie M. H. Camp. “The Intoxication of the Pleasureable Amusement.” Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2004), 60-92.
Danielle C. Skeehan, “Caribbean Women, Creole Fashioning, and the Fabric of Black Atlantic Writing.” The Eighteenth Century 56.1 (Spring 2015): 105-123.
Karol K. Weaver. “Fashioning Freedom: Slave Seamstresses in the Atlantic World.” Journal of Women’s History 24.1 (2012): 44-59.
March 17
Fashion in Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin: Or, Life among the Lowly (1852).
March 24
The Race Man as Dandy; or, the Dandy as Race Man
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Epilogue: Frederick Douglass’s Camera Obscura: Representing the Anti-Slave ‘Clothed and In Their Own Form.’” in Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2015), 197-216.
Monica L. Miller. “W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘Different’ Diasporic Race Man.” in Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
Nell Irvin Painter. “Truth in Photographs,” in Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 185-199.
Cornel West. “The Crisis of Black Leadership.” in Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 1994), 52-70.
March 31
1st primary source analysis is due at Midnight
April 7
From Slave to White House Confidant
April 14
Small Rights in a Post-Emancipation Context
Thavolia Glymph. “‘Wild Notions of Right and Wrong’: From the Plantation Household to the Wider World.” in Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 204-226.
Tera Hunter. “Dancing and Carousing the Night Away.” in To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pgs. 168-186.
Natasha Lightfoot. “‘An Equality with the Highest in the Land’? The Expansion of Black Private and Public Life.” in Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 117-141.
April 21
Rendering Revolution: Sartorial Approaches to the Haitian Revolution
Erica Moiah James, “Decolonizing Time: Nineteenth-Century Haitian Portraiture and the Critique of Anachronism in Caribbean Art,” Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, Vol. 44: 8-23. (2019).
Willson, Nicole. "Unmaking the Tricolore: Catherine Flon, Material Testimony and Occluded Narratives of Female-led Resistance in Haiti and the Haitian Dyaspora." Slavery & Abolition: Strike for Freedom: Acts & Arts of Liberation in the African Atlantic Imaginary (1818-2018). Guest Editors: Celeste-Marie Bernier and Nicole Willson 41, no. 1 (2020): 131-48.
Selection of representation of the Haitian Revolution for in-class visual analyses.
April 28
From the Runway to the Factory Floor: Legacies of Fashion’s Origins in Coerced Labor
The True Cost, documentary (2015).
“Whoever Raises their Head Suffers the Most”: Workers’ Rights in Bangladesh’s Garment Factories,” Human Rights Watch.
Sara Ziff, “Why Models Need Labor Protections,” The Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2016.