For over two centuries, in the North as well as the South, both within their own community and in the public arena, African Americans have presented their bodies in culturally distinctive ways. Shane White and Graham White consider the deeper significance of the ways in which African Americans have dressed, walked, danced, arranged their hair, and communicated in silent gestures. They ask what elaborate hair styles, bright colors, bandanas, long watch chains, and zoot suits, for example, have really meant, and discuss style itself as an expression of deep-seated cultural imperatives. Their wide-ranging exploration of black style from its African origins to the 1940s reveals a culture that differed from that of the dominant racial group in ways that were often subtle and elusive. A wealth of black-and-white illustrations show the range of African American experience in America, emanating from all parts of the country, from cities and farms, from slave plantations, and Chicago beauty contests. White and White argue that the politics of black style is, in fact, the politics of metaphor, always ambiguous because it is always indirect. To tease out these ambiguities, they examine extensive sources, including advertisements for runaway slaves, interviews recorded with surviving ex-slaves in the 1930s, autobiographies, travelers' accounts, photographs, paintings, prints, newspapers, and images drawn from popular culture, such as the stereotypes of Jim Crow and Zip Coon.
Shane White is Professor is Honorary Research Associate in the Department of History, University of Sydney. He is the author of Stories of Freedom in Black New York. Graham White is Honorary Reearch Associate in the Department of History, University of Sydney. Shane White and Graham White are the coauthors of The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech.
What People are Saying About This
Ira Berlin
Must reading for anyone interested in cracking the mysteries of African-American culture. From language to gestures, dance to dress, hair to high-steppin', Stylin' decodes the deepest secrets of black life.
Robin D. G. Kelley
In this brilliant and much anticipated book, Graham White and Shane White have essentially given us a history of the black body in public during the last two centuries. Building from a rich lode of historical and anecdotal evidence, their readings of antebellum clothing and hairstyles, social dancing, parades, beauty pageants, even self-mutilation offer a fresh interpretation of African American political and cultural history. Each page testifies to African American culture's enduring hybridity; it has always drawn from the wellspring of Afro-diasporic traditions, popular culture, the vernacular of previous generations of black folk, technological innovations, and a whole lot of imagination.
