Frontiers in Archaeology Winter Lecture: The Clothes on Their Backs

The Archaeological Research Center presents The Clothes on Their Backs: Interpreting Sartorial Practices of Self-Making Withing The African Diaspora with Dr. Ayana Flewellen, Presendent's Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley. Reception to follow. 

Abstract: During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, periods marked by racialized subjection, sexual exploitation, and economic disenfranchisement, Black women were pinning their hair up with combs, lacing glass beads around their necks, dyeing coarse-cotton fabric with sumac berries and walnuts, and fastening buttons to adorn their bodies and dress their social lives. Through an analysis of material culture and documentary data, my work examines the complex interplay between structural forms of oppression and agency by focusing on the ways sharecropping, tenant and landowning farmers in Texas utilized dress to negotiate racism, sexual exploitation, and exploitive capitalism. I focus my research on the clothing, adornment, and grooming artifacts recovered from the Levi Jordan Plantation, where African American families lived and labored as tenants, wage laborers, and sharecroppers as well as artifacts recovered from the Ransom and Sarah Williams Farmstead, a site lived and labored on by a landowning African American family. Through a Black feminist intersectional lens, this talk will discuss my interpretations of ways practices of dress engaged in by African Americans at the two sites mentioned above were shaped by race, gender, and class operations of power and oppression, within spheres of labor at home and beyond as well as through the threat of racialized and gendered violence, the desire for self-expression, and processes of social reproduction. Building on this research, I will conclude this talk with a discussion regarding my current research interest at the enslaved village area at the Estate Little Princess, a former 18th-century Danish sugar plantation located on the island of St. Croix.

Bio: Ayana Omilade Flewellen is a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley. She will be joining the anthropology department at CUNY-Queens College in fall 2019 as an assistant professor. Her research and teaching interest are shaped by and speak to Black feminist theory, historical archaeology, public and community-engaged archaeology, processes of identity formations, and representations of slavery. The bulk of her research interest spans geographically across the archaeology of the African Diaspora. She has conducted archaeological excavations and oral historical research related to slavery and freedom in the U.S. South as well as the Caribbean. Her current book project examines sartorial practices of self-making among African American tenant, sharecropping and landowning farmers in post-emancipated Texas. Through a synthesis of material culture and documentary data, her current research at the Estate Little Princess, a former 18th-century Danish sugar plantation located on the island of St. Croix, explores the complex interplay between structural forms of oppression and agency by examining the ways Afro-Crucians used to dress to negotiate racism, sexual exploitation, and exploitive capitalism from slavery through freedom. Dr. Flewellen is also the co-founder of the Society of Black Archaeologists, a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing the number of professionally trained archaeologists of African descent through the promotion of social responsibility, and academic excellence.

Friday, March 8, 2019 at 3:00pm to 4:00pm

259 Humanities 2, 259

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