Exquisite Slaves

Exquisite Slaves examines how slaves in Lima, Peru used elegant clothing to express attitudes about gender and status. Drawing on a diverse range of sources and analyses, Walker demonstrates that in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Lima clothing signified both the reach and limits of slaveholders' power and racial domination.

Introduction; 1. Slavery and the aesthetic of mastery; 2. Legal status, gender, and self-fashioning; 3. Black bodies and boundary trouble; 4. Painting, print culture, and colonial ideation; 5. Ladies, gentlemen, slaves, and citizens; Epilogue.