Sartorial insurgencies: Rebel women, headwraps and the revolutionary Black Atlantic. Issue 1 (2nd January 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Willson, Nicole
• Is Part Of: Atlantic studies. Volume 19:Issue 1(2022)
• Page Start: 86
• Page End: 106
• Publication Date: 2022-01-02
• Subjects: Saint-Domingue -- Black Atlantic -- women of colour -- Afro-Creole culture -- fashion -- textiles -- revolution -- headwraps; Globalization -- Periodicals; Atlantic Ocean Region -- History -- Periodicals; Atlantic Ocean Region -- Intellectual life -- Periodicals; Atlantic Ocean Region -- In literature -- Periodicals; Cross-cultural studies -- Atlantic Ocean Region -- Periodicals; 909.0963
• DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2021.1908790
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1478-8810

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This study interrogates the trope of the "tropical temptress" that dominated colonial print culture. Encoded in textual accounts reliant on this trope, it posits, is a subtextual fear of Black female agency. To excavate and rehabilitate the voices of women that have been both occluded and co-opted by the colonialist archive, it recognises a need to look beyond. It takes its cue from Danielle Skeehan, who seeks out traces of Black female insurgency in "extra-discursive and material texts, " privileging the material transcripts that bear unique witness to Black women's experiences in the age of slavery. Focusing on the symbolic importance of Afro-Creole headwraps within the revolutionary Black Atlantic and, in particular, within the context of revolutionary Saint-Domingue, it shows how women of colour in the colonial circum-Caribbean authored their own powerful revolutionary counternarratives to colonial dominance through acts of creativity, ingenuity and domestic labour.