Black Dandies & the Birth of American Minstrelsy: Masculine Fashion, Transatlantic Caricature & Racial Performance, 1828–1836
MHS Event
Chloe Chapin, Harvard University
Comment: Carrie J. Preston, Boston University
This seminar will workshop a work in progress.
The event is hybrid and free of charge. An in-person reception will begin at 4:30 PM.
Between 1828-1830, American illustrator Edward Williams Clay depicted fashionable Black men in satirical prints which suggested that free Black men in Philadelphia were social climbers dressing above their station. At the same time, the character of the Black dandy entered the American sartorial lexicon through stock characters in minstrel shows: Jim Crow, My Long-Tail Blue, and Zip Coon. The characters of these Black dandies in both print and performance marked fashionable Black men as perpetually fashionable and permanently lower class. It also suspiciously linked fashionability with Blackness. Can men’s fashion history help historians better understand the origins of the minstrel show?
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