Abstract

My dissertation, “Refashioning History: Women as Sartorial Storytellers” illuminates the relationship between history and literature as fields of cultural production within the African diaspora. By examining clothes and textiles as narrative forms of individual self-expression and of diasporic connectivity, “Refashioning History” shows how twentieth and twenty-first century women writers from Haiti, the United States, Jamaica, and Guadeloupe mobilize the authorial possibilities of fashion to counter colonial archival silences around the everyday experiences of enslaved women. “Refashioning History” contends that fashion is a powerful narrative mode in history and is critical to understanding how Black women claim—and have been claiming—agency over the fashioning of their own bodies and stories in public and private space. By telling the stories of enslaved, indentured, and free African women and women of African descent that national and colonial histories often ignore, I argue that authors such as Toni Morrison, Marie Chauvet, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Andrea Levy collectively offer a powerful vision for a decolonial Black feminist history of slavery in the Americas.

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