The Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Cultures Workshop, along with American Cultures, is pleased to present:

In this paper I propose that a radical aesthetic of freedom emerges among enslaved peoples of the West Indies under the regime of social death imposed by the Atlantic system of race slavery.  According to the geography of imperialism that governed production and reproduction in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, the colony was understood as a site for the production of goods (sugar, coffee) and not for the reproduction of socially recognized subjects (British citizens) or culture.  Systematically deprived of access to the resources for social reproduction, slaves nonetheless produced and performed novel forms of culture that emerged in the shadow of social death.  Such modes of cultural reproduction—and in particular, those most overtly aesthetic, non-utilitarian forms—served as embodied practices of freedom.  In this paper, I trace the emergence of the figure of the “extravagantly” well attired black dandy in the Jonkonnu Actor Boy performer in Jamaica, and argue that the subsequent spread of the aesthetic of dandyism to white metropolitan environs in England and the U.S. has its roots in Afro-diasporic West Indian performances of freedom.