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 and is currently a faculty member 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 “Sartorial Resistance and the Politics of Redress in the Black Atlantic”. 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.