In the colonial encounter, the privilege granted to the gaze tended to foreground dress as the most immediate and telling of visual signifiers, not only of gender identification, but also of social position. Dressing the body meant setting the scene for the face-to-face confrontation between different parties transported to the New World context of the Caribbean. As a medium, dress constitutes a visual language that created complex and contradictory images on the colonial stage and was employed as a strategy in marking the ambitions, as well as forging both individual and uniform identities, of the different groups of actors cohabiting the slaveholding societies of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue.

This chapter will consider the gendered and clothed body in the francophone Caribbean as it emerges in the colonial textuality of the archives during the period of emancipation (1791–1804). As a material means of self-fabrication, dress disclosed the contradictions inherent in a hetero- and gender-normative system of coloniality whilst expressing the paradoxical desire to both insert oneself within and undo the racial, class and patriarchal hierarchies that fragmented Caribbean society. Later chapters will then explore the extent to which these tactical activities continue to disrupt an oppressive colonial system with its enduring hierarchies of vision and recognition. My emphasis is primarily on the body as a site of performative fabrication and transformation, with particular focus on the political possibilities of dress as a means of transgression and resistance, as well as adherence to colonial authority.

Printed sources published soon after Haitian independence in 1804, together with archival research carried out at the Archives d’outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence and the Archives nationales in Paris, will inform this examination of dress regulations and early performance activities of the islands during the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century period of the slave emancipation and the Haitian Revolution. As Jean Fouchard has noted, the importance afforded to dress amongst the slaves was enough ‘to stir the colonists to restrain this seemingly dangerous form of slave ascension’ (1981: 41) through the introduction of legislative prohibition, and a series of ordonnances that policed the way certain bodies could be attired. It is these stirrings, changes in policy and strategies adopted, as they become evident in colonial discourse of the period, that will inform this study.