Sartorial insurgencies: Rebel women, headwraps and the revolutionary Black Atlantic

Abstract

This article interrogates the trope of the “tropical temptress” that dominated colonial print culture. Encoded in textual accounts reliant on this trope, it posits, is a subtextual fear of Black female agency. To excavate and rehabilitate the voices of women that have been both occluded and co-opted by the colonialist archive, it recognises a need to look beyond. It takes its cue from Danielle Skeehan, who seeks out traces of Black female insurgency in “extra-discursive and material texts,” privileging the material transcripts that bear unique witness to Black women’s experiences in the age of slavery. Focusing on the symbolic importance of Afro-Creole headwraps within the revolutionary Black Atlantic and, in particular, within the context of revolutionary Saint-Domingue, it shows how women of colour in the colonial circum-Caribbean authored their own powerful revolutionary counternarratives to colonial dominance through acts of creativity, ingenuity and domestic labour.