Introduction

Analysing cloth and clothing experiences of enslaved people seems an unpromising approach to understanding early modern materialised identities. Studies of the era’s textile and garment production, commerce, and consumption emphasise novel fabrics, dyes, and styles; chart a growing taste for luxury and semi-luxury items; highlight innovations by manufacturers, merchants and customers alike. Research on constructing subjectivity foregrounds conscious choice, deliberate strategies, and self-defined individuality. Scholarship on enslavement, in contrast, underlines the violence, oppression, exploitation, and impoverishment visited upon bondspeople—circumstances that would apparently negate autonomous assertion of preference, participation in costly modishness, the blossoming of selfhood. Law and practice defined slaves as property; constraint shaped their lived experience; and their cloth and clothing are typically assumed to have been commanded, conventional, and cheap. In these representations, enslaved women and men seem malleable objects, not self-making subjects.

Epitomising slaves’ ostensive textile passivity and privation is the paucity, in Brazil and the Caribbean, of key types of documentation that historians quarry for insight into identity-moulding material practices. First-person accounts like letters and diaries are entirely lacking. So is trial testimony (like that of enslaved Louisianans charged with clothing theft) and detailed fabric and garment listings, as often found in free colonists’ probate inventories. Even advertisements that describe fugitive slaves’ dress, a staple of continental North American newspapers, are sparse.

A good deal of evidence on bondspeople’s textile-making and identity formation nevertheless survives. Admittedly, it was almost always created externally to the individuals represented, and it is permeated with agendas hidden and overt of the planters, administrators, missionaries, travellers, abolitionists, and artists who produced it.