ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the representation of resistance as slave dress across eighteenth-century case studies of a “high” art oil portrait and the “low” print culture of fugitive slave advertisements. It contends that both forms depended upon stolen, unauthorized representations of enslaved sitters who were not the patrons of their own likenesses. Through a unique comparative study of Canadian and Caribbean works, it explores how enslaved Creole and African-born people used African and European clothing for cultural and social ends, including self-care and a defiant redefinition of their assaulted bodies and humanity. Case studies recuperate how the enslaved black people called Dutchess, Andrew, Marie, Florimell, and Cash acquired, preserved, wore, and exploited their dress in ways which thwarted white enslaver control and defied white expectations of blackness as abject, unrefined, and inhuman. The chapter seeks to disrupt the biases of Art History as hierarchies of value through the equitable juxtaposing of “high” and “low” art, the focus on the undervalued realm of slave dress, and its contextualization as a space of resistance.
