Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity by Monica L. Miller (review)

Some of the most fascinating and significant (everyday) performance offerings have been the sartorial, gestural, and linguistic stylings of the modern black dandy, so argues Monica L. Miller in her sweeping and ingenious cultural history, Slaves to Fashion. In this first full-length treatment of black dandyism, Miller argues that the black dandy uses his body to imagine a “being beyond circumscribed notions of race, gender, sexuality, class, and national identity, [...] a visible and visual ideal” (18). At the same time, however, he frequently draws the terms of that ideal (e.g., notions of respectability, consumption, or value) from a dominant, and often oppressive, imagination. Thus, Miller finds, black dandyism is a “ubiquitous, popular performance full of ambivalence” that “teach[es] one about the myriad contexts in which black identity formation takes place” and “visualize[s] the limitations that black people must negotiate and recombine as part of the act of self-definition” (25).

The first and most determinative of these contexts was slavery. Because African captives “experienced an attempted erasure or reordering of their identities in the slave trade,” dandyism “appears to be a phenomenon particularly suited to blacks” (10). Dandyish behavior allowed slaves to counter popular, preconceived notions of blackness, such as the monstrous black beast and the noble savage. In her first chapter, “Mungo Macaroni: The Slavish Swell,” Miller argues that these preconceptions combined with the practice of holding ostentatiously clad “luxury slaves” to produce a racial economy in 18th-century England out of which the first black dandies emerged. These early dandy figures, like freed slave Julius Soubise who openly consorted with members of the London elite, brought together “the oppositional nature of impertinence with the self-conscious use of style and image, [...] taking control of [their] own self-presentation and look” (58). As the free black population in England grew, such brazen performances of self and community reflected how the black image “became as important to blacks as it had been to whites” (72).

White interest in representations of blackness reached something of a peak following the London premiere of Isaac Bickerstaffe’s hugely popular comic opera, The Padlock (1768), which featured the dandyish slave character, Mungo. Mungo mania also extended to the American colonies and eventual United States. In chapter two, “Crimes of Fashion: Dressing the Part from Slavery to Freedom,” Miller considers this exportation of the slave dandy to America and his role in two indigenous performance traditions: slave festivals and blackface minstrelsy. In these traditions, the dandy performed what Miller calls the “crime of fashion,” albeit to opposing ends: “The crime of fashion describes 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). Tracking the narrative dynamics and significations of such “crimes” further, into the works of canonical writers like Stowe, Melville, Twain, and Chesnutt, Miller offers new insights into the importance of sartorial performance to racial formation and (literary) representation in the 19th-century transition from slavery to freedom.

As African Americans navigated the treacherous, uncharted waters of freedom following the Civil War, fin de siècle intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, among others, urged a “New Negro” aesthetic. New Negroes opposed the ways of “former plantation denizens” and “social conservatives”; they were “confident, optimistic, newly sophisticated, demanding equal rights, and determined to remake themselves and their images” (181). How dandyism in performance and literary culture figured in the creation of this aesthetic forms the core of Miller’s next two chapters, “W.E.B. Du Bois’s ‘Different’ Race Man” and “‘Passing Fancies’: Dandyism, Harlem Modernism, and the Politics of Visuality.” Miller’s discussion of Du Bois’s “anxious” or “feminized” masculinity in his everyday...