Fashioning the Black Body: Dress as Embodied Histories, Memory, and Orality in and from the Caribbean.
- Sponsor
- Office of Arts Integration In collaboration with University Library, Department of Theatre, Department of Classics, Spurlock Museum and Krannert Museum of Art
- Speaker
- Dr. Steeve Buckridge
- Contact
- Elias Petrou
- epetrou@illinois.edu
- Originating Calendar
- Library Calendar
In this talk, Steeve Buckridge examines dress among enslaved African women in the early 19th-century Caribbean. It argues that dress functions as a visual language and historical archive of identity, memory, and cultural expression. Clothing reflects colonial ideas of beauty, class, and gender while revealing African diasporic style and representations of Blackness. Studying slave dress helps us understand social roles, cultural retention, and resistance within plantation society.
The Costumes & Customs Lecture Series, sponsored by the Office of Arts Integration and organized in collaboration with the University Library, the Department of Theatre, the Department of Classics, the Spurlock Museum, and the Krannert Art Museum, explores the history and cultural significance of clothing across time and place. Organized by Elias Petrou (University Library) and Olga Maslova (Department of Theatre), the series will feature distinguished speakers and all lectures will be held via Zoom and are free and open to the public.
Steeve Buckridge is Professor of History and Material Culture at Grand Valley State University, specializing in African and Caribbean history and dress and fashion history. He is the author of The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–1890 and a recipient of Ford Foundation and Fulbright fellowships.