| This thesis presents a cultural history of the black dandy from its origins in 18th-century England to the present. Dandies are best known in Western high culture as aesthetes in the Byronic or Baudelairian vein, morally bankrupt do-nothing aristocrats, or outrageous sartorial and conversational Wildean wits. When racialized as black, however, the figure's extravagant bodily display and gestures of critique insert people of the African diaspora into social and political situations that would seek to exclude them. Manipulating dominant cultures to their own ends, their avant-garde fashion presages other unconventional inclinations in the construction of race, class, gender, and sexual identities. Figuring the Black Dandy begins by examining the origins of black dandyism in the forced foppery of luxury slaves in 18th-century England, and then dramatizes a series of "scenes" in which black subjects can be seen understanding and manipulating the construction of their own image. Dandy images from literature and visual culture illustrate the historical and cultural context of each scene, elucidating the variety of dandyisms practiced by black people in England and America. Texts and contexts along this journey include: the life of Julius Soubise, England's most famous black fop, and his relationship to the character Mungo in Isaac Bickerstaffe's comic opera The Padlock (1768); the contemporaneity of American colonial slave festivals Negro Election Day and Pinkster, and the development of blackface theater's Zip Coon; dandy figures instigating and fighting "crimes of fashion" in the literature of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt; W. E. B. Du Bois's self-stylization and creation of the dandy as diasporic race man in Dark Princess (1928); and, the function of the figure as emblematic of black visuality in the Harlem Renaissance, and later, in late 20th-century art via the theories of Frantz Fanon. This thesis contends that the black dandy signifies well beyond an inherited status as paragon of a culture of the self. The black dandy must be understood as an expression of anxieties about black mobility, a redefinition of previously debilitating conceptions of black masculinity and femininity, and a powerful questioning of notions of racial purity and black authenticity. |
