Over the course of the last twenty years, a rich and wide-ranging dialogue about fashion, race, Blackness, colonialism, and decolonization has been taking place around the globe. Extending far beyond the fashion industry, this dialogue gives the histories of Black fashion the attention they deserve. Through exhibitions, films, books, and digital forums, people interested in fashion can see how intimately clothing, fashion, and style connect to the ongoing struggle for racial equality and freedom both in the United States and across the African diaspora. This seminar will explore how literature and the literary imagination can become part of this dialogue. 

While fashion and clothing have often been thought of in linguistic and literary terms (Roland Barthes, 1967; Alison Lurie,1981), what do the specific qualities of the literary imagination bring to the visual, embodied, and affective dimensions of fashionable clothing in the African diaspora? How might we follow James Weldon Johnson’s “Words and Clothes” (1919) and think about the figurative connections between literary and sartorial style in the struggle over and for Black visibility in the eyes of white colonial dominance? How can fashionable clothing be thought of as a decolonial form of writing and storytelling? Can we understand the textual medium of literature as undermining or critiquing the visuality of fashion and its link to the visuality of racial categories? Can the psychoanalytic categories of the imaginary and the symbolic serve as lenses to reveal the interconnectedness of diasporic literature and fashion? Reading fashion and clothing from a Marxist perspective, what does literature tell us about fashion as a reclamation of the stolen lives and unremunerated or poorly compensated labor that so often goes into the production of clothing? And finally, since fashion and clothing have been historically feminized, what do the representations of fashionable clothing in Black, diasporic, and decolonial literature tell us about gender, sexuality, race, and what has been called “racialized feminization” (Eileen Boris and Rachel Salazar Parreñas, 2010)?