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

{ 170 } BOOK REV IEwS accompanying tableau may have had on the audience. (Would they have ruminated on the play’s meaning, gone out for wine, or simply sung along?) To my mind it was Euripides more than Sophocles, with his Brechtian habit of repeating the same exodos play after play (“The gods take many forms”), who truly subverted the rhetoric of closure and alienated his audiences from the moralizing jingles of his predecessors. Perhaps the most pleasant section for me was Hammond’s analysis of Shakespeare ’s tragedies, in which, among other things, Hammond demonstrates just how little we know the meanings and structures of the Bard’s English. His chapters on Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear, in addition to opening these texts up to new interpretations, argue strongly for the treatment of early modern English as a foreign language in its own right. Positioning Shakespeare immediately after Seneca’s Thyestes, Hammond also shows how tragic (and linguistic) alienation was a known quantity in Shakespeare’s time, and he handles the issue of Senecan influence deftly indeed, at the levels of language and psychology alike. The book has its shortcomings—the lack of a proper bibliography being one. And it can be intimidating to be confronted with actual Greek lettering in the early chapters; but a simple online search—two or three clicks will do—will give the reader a print-ready ancient Greek alphabet, complete with pronunciation guidelines. And Hammond, aware that many in his audience are Greekchallenged , transliterates key words and phrases so that you’re never in the dark about what he’s discussing. —ANDREW W. WHITE American University \ Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. By Monica L. Miller. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009. xiii + 390 pp. $89.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. In her introduction to Slaves to Fashion, Monica L. Miller points to the significance of “stylin’ out” in black culture and the interracial and intraracial importance of dressing to the hilt as a personal and political statement. From the music industry to sports to churches, images of glittering, impeccably dressed, and edgily accessorized black men are everywhere in contemporary society. The epitome of “stylin’ out”is the black dandy, whose history Miller traces from the { 171 } BOOK REV IEwS initial contact between Africans and Europeans that led to the institution of slavery. Dandyism, as explored in Miller’s rich and provocative book, becomes a site for examining the ways in which style defines and is defined by black people through shifting political and cultural terrains. The black dandy is a complex and malleable personage who embodies the performativity of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The power of this figure is his ability to both destabilize and fix normative identity constructs. The dandy, Miller states,“exists in the space between masculine and feminine, homosexual and heterosexual, seeming and being, even when not specifically racialized, [and] an investigation of the black dandy’s emergence and perpetuation as a cultural sign of this indeterminacy says much about the politics and aesthetics of racialization and identity formation” (5). Working from this premise, the book’s project is to scrutinize numerous literary, artistic, and social instances from eighteenth-century London’s Enlightenment to twenty-first-century New York’s black cosmopolitanism in which the black dandy is central to the debate around diasporic subject formation. Slaves to Fashion comprises five chapters and an introduction, and the chapters move fluidly from historical moments, make transatlantic crossings, and draw together popular performances, erudite leaders in arts and letters, and artifacts from visual culture. The first chapter, “Mungo Macaroni: The Slavish Swell,” focuses on the emergence of one of the first blackface comic performances in London’s patent theatres. Isaac Bickerstaffe and Charles Dibdin’s comic opera The Padlock (1768) introduced the character Mungo to the stage, and the wildly popular character may be regarded as a prototype for the meticulously festooned, back-talking black dandy who would appear in different guises through theatre history. By the late eighteenth century the Mungo character became closely intertwined in the public imagination through the reallife presentation of Julius Soubise, a freed slave and celebrity London fop...