Episode 2:
Fashion and the Construction of Race
"Free women of color use the head tie to mark—or perhaps a better word is choose—Blackness, even in cases where, under certain conditions, they presented visually as white."
In this episode
Erica Moiah James discusses the importance of fashion in understanding this portrait and the life of this woman. She speaks with historian of fashion, Amelia F. Rauser, Charles A. Dana Professor of Art history at Franklin and Marshall College, whose book The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s was critical for Erica’s research. As Amelia has importantly argued in her text, the “objection of the enslaved Black body and the plantation culture and inhabited, stalked neoclassical dress, which could not escape the material traces of its manufacturer.” Erica’s research on the young Black woman in this portrait draws on Amelia’s work on Caribbean dress, and they will discuss the role that fashion had on the Caribbean and across the Atlantic. In particular, they explore the ways in which women and particularly women of color use fashion to claim power through self-representation.
TRANSCRIPT
Amelia F. Rauser is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Art History and Senior Associate Dean of the Faculty at Franklin & Marshall College. Her first book, Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints, explored the origins of political caricature in the eighteenth century, and her second book, The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s, is a study of the radical neoclassical fashion of the 1790s and its connection to contemporary aesthetic, political, and scientific thought. Her research has been featured in recent editions of the popular history websites Atlas Obscura, History Buffs, and on Huffington Post.
