Authors

Discussion

In examining W.E.B. Du Bois’s relationship to clothing as a tool for self-fashioning and emancipation in his life, as well as in his writings, Monica Miller (2009) posited that the figure of the transatlantic Black dandy could manifest different cultural and political connotations in the US and in Europe. If in the US, racist historical practices such as blackface minstrelsy ridiculed elegance in Black men, in Europe there was an opportunity for “self-fashioning and self-re/presentation in the African diaspora’s response to slavery and oppression” (Miller, 159), heightened by the popularity of jazz dance and music during the twentieth century. This paper examines the encounter of the Black dandy with Eastern Europe, complicating geographies of enslavement, imperialism and performance.

After the First World War, Black entertainers enjoyed widespread popularity not only in cultural hotspots such as Paris and Berlin, but also in various Romanian cities. In a country that had experienced few historic encounters with Black visitors, the new arrivals could fashion new sartorial selves, being often portrayed in photographs and in the visual arts as elegantly suited and hatted figures. The paper probes the extent of this opportunity for reinvention throughout the next four decades. As interwar Romania increasingly sought to demonstrate its proximity to whiteness and cultural affinity to Western colonial powers, the new Black dandies were at risk of being metaphorically divested of their finery, especially through juxtaposition with unclothed colonial subjects, who became increasingly visible on the cinema screen and in Romanian illustrated magazines. Press articles deployed a racializing discourse that likened clothing to a mere veneer of civilisation on Black skin and its inherent “savagery”. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the regime change brought another set of challenges as the Black dandy became an ambiguous figure under state socialism: celebrated as a civil rights icon in the communist imaginary, yet condemned as a bourgeois figure due to his conspicuous style. Romania’s Black (and sometimes queer) dandies were unwilling to relinquish their hard-won sartorial panache, with secret police surveillance documents often detailing their out of place high-quality elegant attire. As Miller (2009) concludes, the figure of the stylish Black man is a highly revealing means of investigating broader “anxiet[ies] about black presence and mobility in global economic and political networks”. By extending this discussion to the Romanian context, this paper contributes to the growing body of scholarship on race and colonialism in Eastern Europe and underscores the region’s significant presence in the above-mentioned global networks.