Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (review)

In Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, Monica Miller explores how black men in the Atlantic diaspora have "style[d] their way from slaves to selves" (1) from the eighteenth century up to the present day. Just as Beau Brummell's immaculate dress obscured and thus destabilized class origin, fancy dress, Miller argues, became a tool first for constructing a new black identity and later for expanding the definition of black masculinity, challenging strict categories of race, gender, and sexuality. Structuring her book chronologically into five loosely linked chapters, Miller considers black diasporic identity in eighteenth- and late-twentieth-century England, and in the eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century United States.

Miller's first two chapters are her most compelling. In chapter 1, she identifies the debut of the sassy, finely attired slave Mungo in Isaac Bickerstaffe and Charles Dibdin's 1768 operetta The Padlock as the moment that the black dandy entered British consciousness. This character made a sensation at the same time as several former "prestige slaves" (20)—including Julius Soubise, who was featured in satirical prints titled "Mungo Macaroni"—gained prominence through their extravagant dress and encroachment on traditionally white spaces. For Miller, Soubise and other black fops represented "a change from being stylized to self-stylization" (71). These public acts of self-definition by members of a growing, sometimes English-born black community challenged British national identity during the colonial era.

Chapter 2 examines nineteenth-century African Americans' use of style and dress to fabricate a new black identity and the reactionary appropriation of the dandy figure in white-authored blackface minstrelsy. Traditional festival days such as Pinkster and Negro Election Day allowed African Americans to parody white authority structures and fuse elements of African and American culture, while dandies in minstrelsy diffused the threat perceived from the well-dressed, free black male. Miller dubs this dialectical process "the crime of fashion," by which she means "the racial and class cross-dressing that was, as practiced by blacks, a symbol of a self-conscious manipulation of authority and, as seen in blackface, an attempted denigratory parody of free blacks' pride and enterprise" (81). The chapter concludes with Miller's fascinating analysis of Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, which, she argues, challenged the minstrel stereotype while questioning the future leadership role of middle-class blacks. These first chapters are particularly strong illustrations of the complex interplay of self-definition and stereotype; they persuade, because Miller explicitly analyzes the complex negotiation between African American efforts at self-definition and hegemonic attempts to defuse their threat.

Chapters 3 and 4 examine how W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson struggled with the role of the black dandy in the creation of the New Negro. Whereas Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition questions the political efficacy of dandified, educated black men, Miller asserts that Du Bois's writing "promotes art and beauty as constituent parts of the arsenal needed for the . . . continuation of the struggle for African American civil rights" (146). In contrast to Hazel Carby, who asserts in her 1998 book Race Men that there was little room for nontraditional males in Du Bois's political vision, Miller claims that his early writing and novel Dark Princess explored the political potential of "differently masculinist" (142) dandified males. Johnson, on the other hand, navigated the tension between forging a cosmopolitan, race-defying identity and the imperative to create race-validating Negro art; instead of "communicat[ing] a kind of racial essence thought to evidence African American humanity and civilization," his Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man "describes blackness . . . as entirely resistant to quantification and expression" (211).

Miller's final and lengthiest chapter leaps forward in time to examine the oeuvres of several contemporary artists who self-identify as black dandies, offering a valuable examination of artists who have not yet...