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

According to the popular adage, clothes make the man; in the case of dandyism, they also perform and spectacularize identity, especially for the black dandy who crosses and re-crosses boundaries of class, gender, sexuality, race, and nation. While studies of the white European male dandy have been pursued, Monica L. Miller's scholarship is a welcome exploration of the black dandy's history, self-fashioning, and evolving self-regard. Spanning several centuries of the African diaspora, this study's strength lies in Miller's contextualized, interdisciplinary scope and her close textual analyses, both verbal and visual. The text is greatly enhanced by carefully selected illustrations, tableaux, prints, photographs, and film stills. Miller illuminates "how and why black people became arbiters of style" and frequently employs chiasmus to reiterate the dandy's categorical crossings: how peoples of the African diaspora "once slaves to fashion—make fashion their slave" (1).

The book opens with a compelling analysis of the origins of the black dandy in the persona of Mungo, modeled on the eunuch from Cervantes's tale "The Jealous Husband" (1613) and transformed into the feisty house servant and "swell" in Isaac Bickerststaffe's opera The Padlock (1768). At the height of the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century, white Britons' ideas of blackness were performed in London theaters and in the satirical tableaux of William Hogarth, a subject that Miller touches on briefly in the final chapter. Drawing from periodicals and paintings of eighteenth-century Britain, Miller provides the necessary visual and historical background of young black boys included—or rather confined—in the households of elite seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britons who showcased them in elegant attire, shrouded them in the illusion of wealth that was not their own, and accessorized them with collars and chains. Miller argues that "these black boys prefigure the black dandies who, in later historical moments, more self-consciously participate in their own stylization" (49). Julius Soubise, the manumitted black companion of the duchess of Queensbury, "fashion[ed] a social debut in his own style" (64) and made "himself over from a black in fop's clothing to a fop who was black" (63). No longer styled by white authors of theater and livery, Soubise as Mungo Macaroni birthed self-stylization that crossed the Atlantic to American stage and literature.

American festivals such as Pinkster and Negro Election Day demonstrated the black community's attention to sartorial expression as a form of self-respect with its ability to satirize, as Miller demonstrates with an accompanying image from Connecticut Magazine (1899); these street festivals suggest public performances that countered blackface and minstrelsy with communal self-representation. Community festivals, minstrelsy, and literary characterizations became sites for reinvestigating what made a gentleman and who could be one. Miller coins the term "crime of fashion," which anticipates the "racial and class cross-dressing … that was a symbol of a self-conscious manipulation of authority" (81). Both perpetrators and victims, black dandies defied and reinforced definitions of blackness, gender, and sexuality in novels such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Herman Melville's Benito Cereno (1856), Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901). In her analysis of Chesnutt's novel, Miller posits that the black dandy character works "through and beyond Negro caricature" to define blackness, masculinity, and the future of black leadership (122).

Chapters Three and Four center on the lives and work of two leading dandy figures of modernity and the Harlem Renaissance who shape and define the New Negro: the race man and didactic promoter of black aesthetics W. E. B. Du Bois and Harlem's resident historian and multitalented cosmopolite James Weldon Johnson. Miller's analyses of Du Bois and Johnson are crucial for understanding image-making, looking, and being seen. Miller reads Du Bois's novel Dark Princesss (1928...