Refashioning History: Women as Sartorial Storytellers

Abstract

My dissertation, “Refashioning History: Women as Sartorial Storytellers” illuminates the relationship between history and literature as fields of cultural production within the African diaspora. By examining clothes and textiles as narrative forms of individual self-expression and of diasporic connectivity, “Refashioning History” shows how twentieth and twenty-first century women writers from Haiti, the United States, Jamaica, and Guadeloupe mobilize the authorial possibilities of fashion to counter colonial archival silences around the everyday experiences of enslaved women. “Refashioning History” contends that fashion is a powerful narrative mode in history and is critical to understanding how Black women claim—and have been claiming—agency over the fashioning of their own bodies and stories in public and private space. By telling the stories of enslaved, indentured, and free African women and women of African descent that national and colonial histories often ignore, I argue that authors such as Toni Morrison, Marie Chauvet, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Andrea Levy collectively offer a powerful vision for a decolonial Black feminist history of slavery in the Americas.

Keywords:

• Historical fiction
• slavery
• fashion
• textiles
• sexual coercion
• Caribbean literature

Notes

1 For more on the nature of the relationship between cultural aesthetics and slavery as a labor economy see Slavery and the Culture of Taste by Simon Gikandi (Princeton UP, 2011).

2 Selections of this article/chapter recently appeared in an article titled “Market Intimacies: Textiles and the Sexual Commerce of Slavery in Caribbean Literature” for a special issue of sx:salon (February 2021) dedicated to Caribbean texts and textiles.

3 Like Owens, my use of the term “sex marketplace” does not refer to sex work as we may understand it today, particularly as this labor is associated with varying degrees of agency across a range of official and unofficial marketplaces. Rather, Owens’s formulation of racialized sexual commerce refers to the ways in which sexual pleasure and fantasy were intimately tied to slavery market logics in the nineteenth century. As Owens writes: “If, as in antebellum New Orleans, that market was one that trafficked in human flesh, then those pleasures could not be unbound from violence. In the sex market, there was no pure consent—no pleasure, no freedom—that was not already shaped by the market through which it was articulated” (4).

4 The intimate relationship between sexual violation and the operation of slavery as a system of creating and managing wealth, has been well documented by authors and scholars alike. The “archival turn” in feminist studies of slavery, advanced by scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Stephanie Camp, Jennifer Morgan, Katherine McKittrick, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Marisa Fuentes, and Jessica Marie Johnson, has resulted not only in a powerful call to center slavery’s archive in discussions of subjectivity, labor, and sex in the Americas, but in an ongoing discussion on methodology.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Siobhan Meï

Siobhan Meï (she/her) is a digital humanist, translator, and literary scholar pursuing a PhD in the Comparative Literature program at UMass Amherst. Siobhan is the co-editor of the interview series Haiti in Translation and the co-founder of the digital humanities project Rendering Revolution: Sartorial Approaches to Haitian History. Her writing and research have appeared in Mutatis Mutandis, SX Salon: Small Axe Project, Callaloo, Caribbean Quarterly, and The Routledge Handbook on Translation, Feminism, and Gender, among other places. Siobhan's dissertation project is supported by a 2020–2021 Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship in Women's Studies (now the Institute for Citizens & Scholars) and a 2020–2022 Research Associateship at the Five College Women's Studies Research Center. Siobhan holds a position as a lecturer in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst.

Dawn Fulton

Dawn Fulton teaches in the Department of French Studies at Smith College.