Monica L. Miller is Assistant Professor of English at Barnard College.
Clothes make the man and other intergendered subjectivities in this stimulating study of the social meaning of fashion in the black community. Barnard English professor Miller surveys the history of sartorial style and flamboyance among black dandies and the cultural responses, both fascinated and alarmed, they have provoked. She paints a broad and teeming panorama...she offers an incisive, nuanced analysis of a rich vein of cultural history. Publisher's Weekly 3rd Aug 2009 Monica L. Miller's close readings dazzle, and her historical reach--confident and unforced--is as long as the transnational arc of black dandyism here is wide. Arresting, discerning, responsible, and urgent, Slaves to Fashion is path-breaking. Literary criticism, visual history, and black Atlantic studies never looked so good. --Maurice O. Wallace, author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775-1995 Revising and augmenting scholarship on minstrelsy, literary representations of blackness, and black sartorial aesthetics and visual culture, Slaves to Fashion is an impressive and meticulously researched treatise on the history of the black dandy. It fills a gap in the scholarship on the cultural politics of black self-fashioning. --E. Patrick Johnson, author of Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity