Output details

Every Mickle Mek a Mockle: Reconfiguring Diasporic Identities

Checinska’s chapter posits the notion of African Diaspora male dress as a creolized, non-verbal ‘Nation Language’. Her focus is upon the performative theatre of diasporic fashion and the careful manipulation of dress whereby the staging of identities is articulated through carefully positioned props (such as a hat deliberately placed to one side, or the wearing of an immaculately pressed suit). Checinska argues that it is in these visible moments that such identities are temporarily reconfigured through the subconscious interweaving of cultures. Considering three moments of presence or arrival: first, the arrival of the Empire Windrush as the moment when the Empire came “home”; second, the spectacle of the Haitian Revolution leaders clad in the ornate uniforms of the Ancient Regime presenting a visual challenge to the equation of Africans with nakedness, and nakedness with the uncivilized, and third, the phenomenon of the Gentlemen of Bacongo, members of “the Society of Tastemakers and Elegant People”, who adopted the dress of their former colonial masters, this article significantly expands our understanding of the codings of fashion as sophisticated diasporic signifiers. Read against a theoretical framework shaped by Kamau Brathwaite, Roland Barthes and Franz Fanon, each of these moments represents the crossing of a psychological, metaphorical and geographical border.

Checinska’s research adds to the scope of the book publication Beyond Borders which in examining our understanding of borders, includes essays by prominent scholars and writers addressing activism, philosophy, film, art and music. Her work on fashion as a creolized language offers new angles into dress and the politics of borders crossing and movement, breaking with regulatory thinking and offering three illuminating case-studies to support her interpretation.

See: http://www.pavementbooks.com/beyondborders

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beyond-Borders-John-Hutnyk

Checinska presented the chapter at the Reconfigurations Conference at Goldsmiths College, November 2011.

See: http://www.gold.ac.uk/pinter-centre/news-events/archive/eventtitle,29679,en.php