The Dress And The Colonial Body In Transatlantic Texts 1767 1853

My dissertation, "The Dress and the Colonial Body in Transatlantic Texts, 1767-1853," argues that the appearance and presentation of women in colonial spaces is used to make colonizing powers visually explicit. This project analyzes the presentation of colonial bodies through the garment of the dress, a piece of clothing which both constructs and reifies gender. I argue that colonial subjects are visually defined, and racial categories are both constructed and stabilized, through the garment of the dress. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature is particularly relevant for an analysis of dress because emerging fashions or habits of dress are directly linked to social and economic events in the larger Atlantic world. The colonization of the new world, as well as the implementation of the institution of slavery, are both political realities which sought to stabilize the categories of gender and race by restricting or legislating the clothing practices of colonized people. Tracing sartorial depictions through a number of visual and textual mediums, I begin by reading narratives of Pocahontas and the novel The Female American (1767). Other chapters read the novel A Woman of Color: A Tale (1808) depicting a biracial Jamaican woman visiting London, and the textile osnaburg and the novel Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853). Through an analysis of literary texts and archival materials, I reveal the dress and dresses of colonial women as performative constructions and attempted stabilizations of the categories of gender and race that highlight the extension of the colonial project to the body of the colonial subject.