Nancy’s Clothing and Bedding: Sartorial Precarity on the Eve of the Civil War

Seminar given by Ayana Flewellen (Assistant Professor, Stanford University)

Friday, February 21, 2025, at 6:10 PM EST (In person and via Zoom)

Columbia University, NY, NY USA and Online via Zoom

The Columbia University Department of Archaeology is excited to announced Ayana Flewellen as our 2024-25 student-nominated speaker, co-sponsored with the Westchester Society of the Archaeological Institute of America.

Abstract:

Amid the racialized servitude, sexual exploitation, and economic disenfranchisement that marked the post-emancipation era in the United States, African American women were styling their hair with combs, lacing glass beads around their necks, dyeing coarse-cotton fabric with indigo-berry and sweetgum bark, and fastening garments to adorn their bodies and dress their social lives. We know so little about the everyday lives — tastes, preferences, decisions — of the African American women who lived through the post-emancipation era in the United States. Yet, the material remains of their everyday sartorial practices contain rich evidence of who these women were, who they wanted to be, and how they wanted to be seen.

Drawing on Chapter 2 of Dr. Flewellen’s current book project The Will to Adorn this presentation explores what can be learned by studying the dress and adornment practices of Black women as practices of navigating the precarity of Black life post-enslavement. Starting at the twilight of the antebellum era in Tennessee, the chapter opens with the story of Nancy, an enslaved women at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage Plantation, who in 1863 walked away from the estate with all her clothing and bedding. Focusing on Nancy’s choice to abscond the Hermitage Plantation with her clothing in hand, Flewellen explores the sartorial choices engaged by African American women in the southern United States at the precipice of emancipation. This chapter asks questions about what women carried and what they left behind — both in their lives, and in the archive — at the dawn of “Surrender.” It threads together documentary sources detailing what formerly enslaved African Americans brought with them into Union controlled contraband camps, with the material culture recovered from excavations of the enslaved quarters at the plantation. Bringing these archives together, the chapter illuminates the quiet objects women kept and abandoned, and how their choices ultimately demonstrated a skill in ascertaining and predicting their needs amidst social instability.

Author bio:

Ayana Omilade Flewellen (they/she) is a Black Feminist, an archaeologist, a artist scholar and a storyteller. As a scholar of anthropology and African and African Diaspora Studies, Flewellen’s intellectual genealogy is shaped by critical theory rooted in Black feminist epistemology and pedagogy. This epistemological backdrop not only constructs the way they design, conduct and produce their scholarship but acts as foundational to how she advocates for greater diversity within the field of archaeology and within the broader scope of academia. Flewellen is the co-founder and current Board Chair of the Society of Black Archaeologists and sits on the Board of Diving With A Purpose. They are an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research and teaching interests address Black Feminist Theory, historical archaeology, memory, maritime heritage conservation, public and community-engaged archaeology, processes of identity formations, and representations of slavery and its afterlives. Flewellen has been featured in National Geographic, Science Magazine, PBS and CNN; and regularly presents her work at institutions including The National Museum for Women in the Arts.

Registration for campus access is open until 4:00 PM ET, Thursday, February 20th. Please note that campus is presently closed to non-CU affiliates without a campus access code.

Zoom registration will be kept open until 4:00 PM ET, Friday, February 21st. The Zoom link will be sent one hour before the event. Any questions or problems please contact archaeology@columbia.edu.

Find more information online here.

Image: Courtesy of Ayana Omilade Flewellen.

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