Fiber to Flesh: Textiles and Black Resistance in Slave Narratives

This essay examines how textiles operate as violent aesthetic tools in the formation of Black existence during American slavery. While the American plantation relied on cotton production and the regulation of what the enslaved would wear, enslaved people transformed these fibers into instruments of refusal, creativity, and ontological reclamation. A study of textiles during American slavery exposes how the violence of enslavement was lived on the surface of the body through clothing. Reading art and runaway advertisements alongside narratives by Olaudah Equiano, John Brown, Booker T. Washington, and Harriet Jacobs, this article reveals how the enslaved resisted and rebelled against the textiles they were forced to wear. Bringing together visual art, runaway slave advertisements, and slave narratives, I argue that textiles form a crucial archive for understanding Black rebellion and resistance. This essay situates historical acts of resistance through textiles; it is through clothing that enslaved people articulated a radical insistence on their presence, thus turning fiber into flesh.