Black Dandies in the Diaspora

Slaves to Fashion traces the origins and development of the black dandy in literature, art, and culture from the eighteenth century to the present. In the process, Monica L. Miller demonstrates the importance of black dandyism to performance studies, black Atlantic studies, modern aesthetics, fashion studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Far from a marginal (if provocative) figure in modern culture, the black dandy is revealed as indispensible to the formation of Afro-diasporic identity. The book’s pantheon of actual and fictional dandies — high and low, masculine and effeminate, enslaved and freed, respectable and rebellious — are themselves a testament to the multiple and shifting articulations of blackness within transatlantic modernity since the Enlightenment. A polished work of scholarship that succeeds in being both conceptually focused and ambitious in scope, Slaves to Fashion shows that the black dandy tradition is much richer, more various, and, yes, queerer than scholars have previously acknowledged.

The first book-length study of the black dandy, Slaves to Fashion moves fluidly across four centuries, revealing the persistence of dandies in the diaspora while remaining attentive to the vicissitudes of black style. Beginning with the inauguration of the black dandy in the transatlantic slave trade and colonial representations of Enlightenment England, the book moves on to examine black dandyism in nineteenth-century American literature and performance, the black modernism of the Harlem Renaissance, and, finally, the “black cosmopolitanism” of contemporary African, British, and African American dandy artists. Throughout the book, Miller is interested in the way the iconography of black dandyism travels across time and space, creating spectacular, hybrid performances of race, gender, and identity.

How are we to define the black dandy and his mobile, sartorial strategies? What is the relationship between black dandyism and queerness? Although not primarily concerned with gay identity or same-sex desire, Slaves to Fashion sheds light on the queerness of the black dandy tradition and the various ways in which sexuality and gender have been central to the production of blackness. (This claim is elaborated with particular clarity in the book’s final chapters.) As Miller argues, all dandies are queer, or “quare,” performative subjects whose self- fashioning is, above all, “a lesson in interrogating identity” (11). The book explicitly positions dandyism as both liberatory and oppressive, but the dandies that fill its pages mostly appropriate white, elite styles to disrupt and destabilize identity’s reifications — in particular, categories of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation. This deconstructive approach is reflected in Miller’s overarching argument about the black dandy’s antiessentialist critique and liminal status as a mixed, queer subject. Here readers may find that the book’s main claims are familiar: blackness and masculinity are performative; dandyism is characterized by “fluidity” and “indeterminacy.” Nevertheless, Slaves to Fashion powerfully illuminates what is at stake in the black dandy’s project, dispelling long-standing misconceptions about the politics of black self-fashioning that would dismiss diasporic dandyism as white aspiration, middle-class striving, or mere mimicry of European or elite forms of fancy dress.

Miller consistently pays close attention to the multiplicity of dandyism in the black Atlantic — how different forms of dandyism were practiced at the same time by African Americans, and how seemingly similar forms of class and racial cross-dressing signified differently. For example, she discusses dandies in annual African American festivals such as Pinkster and Negro Election Day, in which black slaves in fancy dress or military attire crossed racial and class boundaries by participating in parades, dances, and other “rituals of reversal.” For these men, probably the first black dandies in America, racial and class cross-dressing was a form of cultural translation and transformation — a “mélange of European and African . . . modes of self-fashioning” (89). However, in the context of minstrel theater, the racial and class cross-dressing of the black dandy (now in blackface) becomes something altogether different, what Miller describes as a “white fantasy of black freedom and equality” (99). In this way, we discover...