Slaves to fashion : black dandyism and the styling of black diasporic identity /
"Clothes make the manand other intergendered subjectivitiesin 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 a...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Durham :
Duke University Press,
2009
Durham [N.C.] : 2009 Durham [N.C.] : 2009 |
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| Summary: | "Clothes make the manand other intergendered subjectivitiesin 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: the 18th-century English dandy whose stylishness subtly subverted the markers of slavery; his appearance in the writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain and W.E.B. Du Bois; his reappearance in 20th-century Harlem as an icon of freedom and modernity; his role in avant-garde film and art; and modern-day avatars Sean Combs and Andre 3000. Throughout, she explores the protean manifestations of dandyism, its blurring of racial and sexual boundaries, its significations of status and respectability, its capacity to satirize white fashionableness even as it expressed black determination to emulate and surpass white high-style. Miller's writing can be densely academic"A dandy is a kind of embodied, animated sign system that deconstructs given and normative categories of identity"but she offers an incisive, nuanced analysis of a rich vein of cultural history. Photos. (Nov.)" --Publishers Weekly Reviews "Clothes make the manand other intergendered subjectivitiesin 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: the 18th-century English dandy whose stylishness subtly subverted the markers of slavery; his appearance in the writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain and W.E.B. Du Bois; his reappearance in 20th-century Harlem as an icon of freedom and modernity; his role in avant-garde film and art; and modern-day avatars Sean Combs and Andre 3000. Throughout, she explores the protean manifestations of dandyism, its blurring of racial and sexual boundaries, its significations of status and respectability, its capacity to satirize white fashionableness even as it expressed black determination to emulate and surpass white high-style. Miller's writing can be densely academic"A dandy is a kind of embodied, animated sign system that deconstructs given and normative categories of identity"but she offers an incisive, nuanced analysis of a rich vein of cultural history. Photos. (Nov.)"--Publishers Weekly Reviews "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."--BOOK JACKET |
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| Item Description: | This WorldCat-derived record is shareable under Open Data Commons ODC-BY, with attribution to OCLC |
| Physical Description: | xiii, 390 p. : ill. ; 24 cm xiii, 390 p. : ill. ; 25 cm xiii, 390 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm |
| Awards: | William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Winner, 2009 |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (p. [347]-370) and index Includes bibliographical references (pages 291-370) and index Includes bibliographical references and index |
| ISBN: | 0822345854 (cloth : alk. paper) 0822345854 0822346036 (pbk. : alk. paper) 0822346036 9780822345855 (cloth : alk. paper) 9780822345855 9780822346036 (pbk. : alk. paper) 9780822346036 |