Episode 16
Jonathan M. Square is a a writer and historian specializing in fashion and visual culture of the African Diaspora. He holds a PhD in history from New York University. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Black Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design, and previously was a Lecturer in the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature at Harvard University.
We had the pleasure of speaking to Jonathan about his current book project — tentatively titled “Negro Cloth: How Slavery Birthed the American Fashion Industry”. The book frames sartorial agency among enslaved peoples as a form of resistance and places sumptuary laws within the context of the development of Atlantic capitalism from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. We spoke to Jonathan about the Harvard Extension School Faculty Aide students who have contributed to the research of this book and and to his “Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom” project.