Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity [Paperback]

Monica L. Miller (Author)

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Product Details

Paperback: 390 pages
Publisher: Duke University Press (Dec 1 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0822346036
ISBN-13: 978-0822346036
Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 15.5 x 2.8 cm
Shipping Weight: 635 g
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #319,303 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

Review

"Clothes make the man and other intergendered subjectivities in this stimulating study of the social meaning of fashion in the black community. Barnard English professor Miller surveys the history of sartorial style and flamboyance among black dandies and the cultural responses, both fascinated and alarmed, they have provoked. She paints a broad and teeming panorama...she offers an incisive, nuanced analysis of a rich vein of cultural history."Publisher's Weekly 3rd Aug 2009 "Monica L. Miller's close readings dazzle, and her historical reach--confident and unforced--is as long as the transnational arc of black dandyism here is wide. Arresting, discerning, responsible, and urgent, Slaves to Fashion is path-breaking. Literary criticism, visual history, and black Atlantic studies never looked so good."--Maurice O. Wallace, author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775-1995 "Revising and augmenting scholarship on minstrelsy, literary representations of blackness, and black sartorial aesthetics and visual culture, Slaves to Fashion is an impressive and meticulously researched treatise on the history of the black dandy. It fills a gap in the scholarship on the cultural politics of black self-fashioning."--E. Patrick Johnson, author of Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity

Product Description

The first book on the history of black dandyism, "Slaves to Fashion" examines the pivotal role that style has played in the politics and aesthetics of African diasporic identity formation. The figure of the black dandy first emerged in eighteenth-century England as an attempt to control the representation of Africans by imposing upon domestic slaves luxurious uniforms intended to flaunt their masters' wealth. These uniforms were soon manipulated by those who wore them, initiating a struggle between master and slave in which style emerged as a primary means of self-expression for blacks. Tracing the history of the black dandy forward to contemporary celebrity incarnations such as Andre 3000 and Sean Combs, Monica L. 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, fluid ways of fashioning political and social possibility in the black Atlantic world. Miller draws from literature, film, photography, print ads, and music to generate a cultural history of the black dandy, ranging from Mungo Macaroni, a freed slave and well-known dandy in the London social scene in the eighteenth century, to the ways that contemporary visual artists represent the black dandy as an emblem of black cosmopolitanism. Along the way, she addresses the role of the black dandy in nineteenth-century American literature and drama, W. E. B. Du Bois' use of the dandy to investigate the relationship between black masculinity and cultural nationalism, and black dandyism in the modernist aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance. With masterful aplomb worthy of its iconographic subject, "Slaves to Fashion" analyzes and celebrates the black dandy as a cultural figure in the Atlantic diaspora.

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Amazon.com: 3.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)

4 of 12 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Slaves to Fashion., Jan 24 2011

By Guerre - Published on Amazon.com

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This review is from: Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Hardcover)

Stock photo used, book arrived without dust jacket... and for the price, that should have been included.

The book itself reads like a dissetation. I thought I was getting a book that I'd read from cover to cover without pausing, but I found myself not rushing to pick it up after putting it down. The author did his/her research... but I was hoping for more than research.

4 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars How black people, once slaves to fashion, have made fashion their slave, Oct 23 2009

By ROROTOKO - Published on Amazon.com

This review is from: Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Paperback)

"Slaves to Fashion" is on the ROROTOKO list of cutting-edge intellectual nonfiction. Professor Miller's book interview ran here as cover feature on October 16, 2009.

› Go to Amazon.com to see both reviews 3.5 out of 5 stars