Accessories/Accessaries; or, What’s in Your Closet?

This article explores the repeating patterns of the subordinate colonial relationship using a handful of pictures that make links between slavery, pageantry, racial uplift, Jamaica’s dancehall culture, and dress. Through a truncated discussion about the body, emasculation, clothing, and race, it offers a narrative about postemancipation Jamaican males that looks beneath their masks to suggest how legacies of slavery are being played out through them in dynamic and queer ways. Jamaica’s history is one that has always called for the Janus-faced accessory: a dressing up ritual to disguise the subaltern and the transgressive. After two hundred years of masquarades and street performances—a history that spans from Belisario to Beenie Man—it is time to ask the question, what’s in your closet?