Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima by Tamara J. Walker (review)

IN THE LAST TWO DECADES, black agency in colonial and early republican Latin America has been the subject of numerous studies (Herman Bennett, Nicole von Germeten, José Ramón Jouve-Martín, Rachel Sarah O'Toole, Matthew Restall, and Ben Vinson III, for example). Tamara J. Walker's Exquisite Slaves was a much-needed contribution to this growing scholarship, which, until this point, had neglected the role clothing has played in shaping the Afro-Latin American experience. In Walker's own words, "this book shows how, through clothing, slaves expressed ideas about their status and, in the process, challenged the social, economic, and—most importantly—legal boundaries of slavery" (13). This nuanced approach enhances our understanding of the varied strategies men and women of African descent, both slave and free (despite Walker's focus on enslaved Afro-Limeños) deployed to garner and exert agency in colonial and early republican Latin America.

The book covers the period 1700–1854, focusing on high and late colonial as well as early republican and post-slavery Lima, Peru. The focus on the eighteenth century illustrates how race increasingly became "the usual way society does business," as critical race theory contends (Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, New York UP, 2017, 7). 1854 marked the abolition of slavery in the young Peruvian republic, but, as Walker shows, not the end of Lima's, or Latin America's "antiblack ethos." Thus the book encompasses a crucial period in early modern racial history. Throughout her analysis, Walker deploys theories developed by US scholars to understand slavery and race relations in the nineteenth-century US South, being careful to highlight the sharp differences between the two contexts. In this manner, Walker avoids the pitfalls of blindly applying these theories to the Latin American environment.

Chapter 1 of the book, "Slavery and the Aesthetic of Mastery," focuses on how slave owners in eighteenth-century Lima dressed their black slaves to showcase their own elite status—what Walker calls "the aesthetic of mastery." Walker illustrates how white Limeños—both Peninsular-born Spaniards and American-born creoles—disobeyed sumptuary regulation to attire their slaves in "costly finery," according to one of the many regulations Walker cites. While chapter 2 focuses on how enslaved Afro-Limeños employed extralegal means to access sartorial luxury, this chapter focuses on how white Limeños disregarded and, in effect, challenged sumptuary laws that sought to curtail their "scandalous excess," as the same law put it. In this chapter, Walker develops one of the book's two major claims, namely, that "for elite Spaniards in Lima, control over dress … was central to their assertion of wealth, status, and racial dominance in the region" (18). By dressing their slaves as they pleased with disregard to law, white Limeños also showed their control over black bodies.

As stated above, chapter 2 focuses on how enslaved eighteenth-century Afro-Limeños employed extralegal means to access sartorial elegance. In this chapter, Walker examines colonial court cases where enslaved Afro-Limeños were tried for allegedly stealing articles of clothing from their owners' wardrobes or stealing money from their owners to purchase luxury clothing items. It is in this chapter that Walker begins to develop the book's second and most important claim, namely, that "elegant clothing was also a tool that enslaved men and women used to negotiate their status, express their ideas about masculinity and femininity, and attend to conceptions of belonging in ways that not only reflected but also challenged the dominant norms" (18). This chapter shows how enslaved Afro-Limeños did this by using extralegal means to acquire clothing whose elegance and cost often surpassed those of Spaniards. Thus, the chapter shows how clothing served blacks as both a means and end of garnering and exercising agency.

Chapter 3 looks at the acquisition and bequest of clothes through testaments by Spaniards, creoles, and free Afro-Limeños. This is the...