| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Stylin': African American Expressive Culture from its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit. By Shane White and Graham White. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. xviii, 301 pp. $30.00, isbn 0-8014-3179-4.)

Two Australians, Shane White and Graham White, collaborate on this historical examination of African American style, which they define as "that which is distinctive about the body language of African Americans and . . . the ways in which they have constructed their appearance." The Whites adeptly link presentations of the body with other modes of black aesthetics and tie present styles to those of the past. 1

The first three chapters concern clothing worn by African Americans during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Reading between the lines of often prejudicial white narratives, the authors also tease from written accounts the actual kinesics of African Americans of the period. They demonstrate that the clothes chosen by blacks exhibit that key element of African and African American aesthetics—improvisation—just as much as do other expressions of African American creativity such as music and quilting. An extended discussion on male hairstyles during the earliest periods of enslavement in the United States compares black male hairstyles with the then white male fashion of wearing wigs. The Whites devote less consideration to discussion of the woman's headwrap, which I researched extensively for New Raiments of Self: African American Clothing in the Antebellum South (1997). . . .

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