UC Berkeley

Dandyism is not only a praxis of representational conflict waged through sartorial aesthetics, fashion, and clothing; it is also a practice of stylistic refusal. In this dissertation, I examine the Harlem Renaissance as a site of conflict and resistance where a diverse array of collective actions produced meanings and narratives of a syncretic cultural style in direct conflict with the distortions and myths of Western racial production. In each author’s readings I locate how the Black dandy indexes the notion that Black modern life was structured in and around the circulation of affective embarrassment and the violence that disciplines transgressive subjects. Consequently, I read Black dandyism as a practice of cultural syncretism that transforms into a practice that makes space for stylistic refusal and an expression of freedom.

Aside from the conflict between Harlem’s subculture and a regime of anti-Black racist production, Harlem’s artists were keenly aware of the tension amongst Black leaders and artists as they battled over the politics of Black representation. Harlem’s Black dandies embodies both conflicts. Their extravagant style, defiant demeanor, and radical gender identities and sexual practices queer Blackness, race, gender, sexuality, and modern notions of citizenship and national belonging.

In the first chapter, I read Langston Hughes’s short story “Home” as an adaptation of the tragic ending familiar to nineteenth century tragic mulatto/a narratives. In the second chapter I explore the overt expression of queer Blackness in Richard Bruce Nugent’s posthumous novel, Gentleman Jigger. Nugent, as one of the few openly queer artists of the period, straddles a Black cultural and European decadent tradition in a thoroughly modern novel that includes a critique of the limiting forms of Blackness within the Renaissance and a critique of the violence that structures early twentieth century “white” American culture. In the third chapter’s reading of Nella Larsen’s Passing, I argue that the novel contains a rich merging of the Black dandy with the tragic mulatta, mixed race subject, and sex worker, four figures that deeply implicated and distorted conceptions of Black womanhood.