Re-enacting Tropes of Black Masculinity in Yinka Shonibare’s Diary of a Victorian Dandy

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn his photographic series Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998), the artist Yinka Shonibare, MBE, inserts his black body into the role of a fictional Victorian dandy. Throughout the five photographs detailing moments of his day as a Victorian dandy, an all-white entourage admires his centrally placed, heroic presence. Most readings of Shonibare’s series relate it to William Hogarth’s satirical painting cycle The Rake’s Progress (1733), on which it is based, and read it as a humorous inversion of the marginalised positions black figures previously assumed in the history of British painting. In relation to these art historical precedents, Shonibare’s performances have been understood as “subversive” acts. I read his performances not through a history of black marginalisation, but through a parallel history of black hypervisibility in modern and contemporary popular culture, which extends from Victorian blackface minstrelsy to commercial hip-hop culture. Rather than simply inverting black marginalisation, Shonibare’s performances walk a tightrope between black stereotypes and subversive humour that can also be read as complicit with the status quo.