ABSTRACT
As Long’s quote reveals, Europeans have been fascinated by the material cultural practices of African and African-descended peoples for centuries. But as Cooper aptly points out, this historical fascination and its oppressive repercussions have often been retroactively erased and suppressed, frequently in rather systematic ways as in the case of Canada. This chapter is an attempt to explore the aspects of black female slave dress in relation to the broader social, historical, political and cultural context of the experiences of enslaved black women within Trans Atlantic Slavery, especially in Montreal. I will do so through a careful reading of the black female slave in François Malépart de Beaucourt’s Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786; Figure 1.1). In Chapters 3 and 4 of this volume I have attempted to provide interpretations both of the representation of the black female sitter’s body and the fruit still life that she holds; in both cases, making material and symbolic links between the way that Malépart de Beaucourt represented these aspects of the portrait and the sitter’s interconnected sexualization and racialization. Following Nettleford’s idea of dress as a site of identity and masking,1 I would like to ask here, what if anything can we learn from the representation of the dress of the black female slave in this work?
