Books by Michael McMillan
Since the eighteen century, a number of writers have attempted to unpack the dialogic relationshi... more Since the eighteen century, a number of writers have attempted to unpack the dialogic relationship between contemplation and intuition most notably Immanuel Kant. 1 Applied to understanding the creative process of the arts practitioner this has had little attention apart within scientific, educational and action research contexts. 2 Yet intuition provides a form of knowing-in-practice for many arts practitioners often expressed as knowing the right thing at the right moment of a 'disciplinary-mastery' in their respective practices and challenging the critical orthodoxy attendant to intra-disciplinary heresy. Intuition is also pertinent to those who have experienced a paradigmatic shift from a singular art form practice towards an inter-disciplinarity where a heretical crossing of boundaries is implicated that is fundamentally misunderstood particularly in a Eurocentric context where there is a fear of cross-disciplinary miscegenation. Within education, these are those practitioners who are prepared to take risks within an increasingly bureaucratic and meritocratic education system that tends to engage with inter-disciplinarity as a strategic practice that can holisti-Michael McMillan is a writer, playwright and artist/curator. His work includes Brother
My mother’s best “set”: notes on trans-diasporic crocheting practices - abstract
In an oral hist... more My mother’s best “set”: notes on trans-diasporic crocheting practices - abstract
In an oral history workshop as part of the installation-based exhibition The Front Room ‘Inna Joburg’ at the FADA Gallery, Johannesburg (2016), black women from Soweto shared stories about the crochet doilies they had made and brought with them, which resonated with me on a trans-diasporic level by invoking memories of how my mother acquired crochet ‘sets’ from friends and work colleagues. They often made their crochet doilies as domestic labourers in the homes of white employers under apartheid in South Africa, and before my mother came to England in 1960, she worked as a maid for a Dutch family for six years in Curacao.
As a form of knitting thread with a hooked needle, black women across the African diaspora have transformed colonialised crochet into colourful three-dimensional sculptural pieces where each doily is unique to the individual maker. This essay will look at how crocheting in the diasporic domestic interior create express postcolonial modernity, aspirations, creative agency, entrepreneurship, creolised aesthetics, femininity, belonging and becoming that challenge and resist colonial representations of black women as not respectable, good spouses and home-makers.
Keywords: crochet, creolisation, creative agency, becoming
Saga Bwoys, Rude Bwoys and Saggers: rebellious black masculinities
Abstract
Within white cultur... more Saga Bwoys, Rude Bwoys and Saggers: rebellious black masculinities
Abstract
Within white cultural hegemonic representations of the black male body there is a recycling of colonial fantasies based on fear and desire of ‘the sexual superstud, the athlete, and the rapacious criminal’ (Staples 1982: 4) that still casts an ontological shadow in the formation of diasporic black masculinities. Yet black subjects of African descent have historically played with, subverted and resisted these tropes from dandifying servant’s uniforms to emancipated former slaves expressing their freedom by appropriating the sartorial aesthetics of white middle class gentlemen, who in the eyes of white elites were seen as ‘crimes of fashion’ (Miller 2009).
In a rhizoid network of racial, transcultural and diasporic exchange, transfer and appropriation (Mercer 1995) where diaspora operates as metaphor (Hall 1993) identity is a performative process of ‘becoming’ (Hall 1993) for diasporic black subjectivity. In this diasporic exchange, the postwar migration of Caribbean men to Britain, and the sartorial interventions of the ‘Saga Bwoys’ (bwoy as in Caribbean vernacular). This was later followed by Jamaican men bringing the ‘Rude Bwoys’ from the ghettos of Kingston, Jamaica during the 1960s. The antecedents of the Saga Bwoys and Rude Bwoys are the Zoot Suitors from poor black and Mexican urban areas in 1940s America, who share with the former a sartorial style for sensual loosely fitting flamboyant suits that had the subversive power of the ‘Sweet Bwoy’ (in diasporic vernacular), and the latter the defiant rebellious ‘Bad Bwoy’. Meanwhile, Saga Bwoys and Rude Bwoys are antecedents for contemporary Saggers, who low rise their pants to reveal underwear. This article looks at how Saga Bwoys, Rude Bwoys and Saggers used/use creative agency to resist, play with and transgress tropes that racialise the representation of the diasporic black male body through their embodied material culture. In this analysis, I draw on Carol Tulloch’s (2010) triumvirate style-fashion-dress, Daniel Miller’s (1996) transcendent/transient duality in relation to theories of ‘cool’ and creolisation, as well as Stuart Hall’s (1993) idea of ‘becoming’ to support the formulation of an transdisciplinary conceptual framework.
Keywords: Saga Bwoy, Rude Bwoy, Saggers, ‘style-fashion-dress’, creolisation, cool, transcendent/transient.
Abstract
The Front Room ‘Inna Joburg’: a hybrid constructed intervention
Emanating from the Vi... more Abstract
The Front Room ‘Inna Joburg’: a hybrid constructed intervention
Emanating from the Victorian parlour the material culture of front rooms created Post War African-Caribbean migrants and later Black British families expresses a tension between the sacred codes of respectability, propriety, and decorum, and the profane stylistic signification of modernity and consumer culture. This formed the basis of an installation-based exhibition The West Indian Front Room: Memories and Impressions of Black British Homes (WIFR) that I guest-curated at the Geffrye Museum, London 2005-06 (McMillan 2005-06). It evoked/invoked a range of responses from a diverse range of audiences that signified their lived experience of the material culture of this ‘special room’ where hospitality towards guests takes place in the domestic interior. In recognition of this inter-cultural appeal subsequent iterations were referred to as The Front Room (TFR). The most recent TFR iteration is an installation-based exhibition entitled The Front Room ‘Inna Joburg’ (TFRiJ) that took place at the FADA Gallery (Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg (UJ)) from 30th June–25th August 2016. It was produced in collaboration with the Visual Identities in Art & Design Research Centre (VIAD) as part of a two-month artist residency that I had during that period. In a post-apartheid Johannesburg contact was made with local Black, Coloured and Indian families (taking account of apartheid’s legacy of racial hierarchies). But unlike previous TFR iterations TFRiJ circumstancses of the residency did not provde the time and space for an organic research process where I normally work peripatetically with local communities to identify and source materials, and gather oral history interviews and archive images that might be used to dress the installation and feature in the exhibition. Rather than carrying out research remotely, it was decided to reconfigure TFRiJ curatorially towards WIFR. This raises questions about the ‘authencity’ of TFRij as an TFR iteration, and therefore, instead of focusing on the end product, this article focuses on the process, by looking at how WIFR’s theoretical framework and other TFR iterations informed the curatorial intentions, as well as what practical strategies were developed to support the curation, production and public engagement activities of TFRiJ. Rather than seeing TFRiJ’s as a replication of WIFR this approach revisits it’s process as a ‘hybrid constructed intervention’.
Saga Bwoys and Rude Bwoys
Migration, Grooming, and Dandyism
Michael McMillan
ABSTRACT
I have be... more Saga Bwoys and Rude Bwoys
Migration, Grooming, and Dandyism
Michael McMillan
ABSTRACT
I have been always struck by how men of my father’s generation were so well dressed in those iconic black-and-white documentary photographs depicting their arrival after a three-week transatlantic journey by sea. They wore neatly pressed suits with a white breast pocket handkerchief, polished brogue shoes, white starched shirt with throat-straggling tie, and a trilby hat cocked at an angle. In Eastern Caribbean vernacular they were saga bwoys, or sweet bwoys, masculine personae who, in my rite of passage from a short-pants “colored” boy to a black British young man, I saw as exemplars of good grooming in their sartorial attention to detail as words for the ladies danced off their tongues like Lord Kitchener’s calypso. These “lonely Londoners” would later become Jamaican rude bwoys, swaggering as if to a ska or reggae beat in their two-tone mohair suits with the attitude and creole chat of the best-dressed chicken on the street. Saga bwoys and rude bwoys are constituents of the contemporary raggamuffin geneology of subcultural black masculine practices that have been self-fashioned in the rhizoid network of racial, transcultural, and diaspora exchange and transfer.
Yet, limited focus has been given to how and what postwar Caribbean migrant men contributed to a diasporic understanding of black dandyism through the material culture and performativity of the saga bwoys and rude bwoys. Using Carol Tulloch’s “style-fashion-dress,” among other conceptual frameworks, this essay begins to explore the ontology and materiality of a process that saw the aesthetic embodiment and reconstruction of diasporic Caribbeanness in a British context of the dressed black male body—a body that would come to reconfigure the streets of urban Britain with fresh, dynamic masculinities in motion.
Keywords: saga boy, rude boy, style-fashion-dress, black masculinities, performativity
Papers by Michael McMillan
The Persistence of Taste, 2018
A roundtable discussion exploring how the work of black artists (in the fields of theatre, perfor... more A roundtable discussion exploring how the work of black artists (in the fields of theatre, performance and visual art) and the experiences of black people living in Britain have been made available through artistic and archival practices.
Choice Reviews Online, 2014
Through a wide range of case studies from international scholars and practitioners across a varie... more Through a wide range of case studies from international scholars and practitioners across a variety of fields, the publication maps how oral history interviews contribute to a relational practice that is creative, rigorous, and ethically grounded.
Since the eighteen century, a number of writers have attempted to unpack the dialogic relationshi... more Since the eighteen century, a number of writers have attempted to unpack the dialogic relationship between contemplation and intuition most notably Im-manuel Kant. 1 Applied to understanding the creative process of the arts practitioner this has had little attention apart within scientific, educational and action research contexts. 2 Yet intuition provides a form of knowing-in-practice for many arts practitioners often expressed as knowing the right thing at the right moment of a 'disciplinary-mastery' in their respective practices and challenging the critical orthodoxy attendant to intra-disciplinary heresy. Intuition is also pertinent to those who have experienced a paradigmatic shift from a singular art form practice towards an inter-disciplinarity where a heretical crossing of boundaries is implicated that is fundamentally misunderstood particularly in a Eurocentric context where there is a fear of cross-disciplinary miscegenation. Within education, these are those pract...
Routledge, Aug 5, 2016
The Black Body and Shakespeare: Conversations with Black Actors (abstract) Drawing on interviews ... more The Black Body and Shakespeare: Conversations with Black Actors (abstract) Drawing on interviews with Cyril Nri, Dona Croll, Claire Benedict, Ellen Thomas amongst others this essay will explore the contemporary experience of black (of African descent) actors in playing different roles in Shakespeare in the UK. The focus within this context will look at the intersection of race, gender, class, sexuality and identity in terms of casting operartions, directorial approaches and how these actors negotiate their roles within the production processes. Intrinsic to this discussion is how the black body has been represented through Shakespeare that has been historically encoded within a dominant regime of beauty that sees it as ugly yet depending on the cultural politics that frame an interpretation at a given moment these tropes have been either challenged or subverted. How for instance did the cultural politics of the Black is Beautiful movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s affect how the black roles in Shakepeare were represented and intepreted? Moreover, within this context we will look at how black actors have used performance traditions from the African diaspora to reinterpret and reclaim the language, dramaturgy and spiritual world of Shakespeare. © Dr Michael McMillan – July 2014
The Male Body in Representation
From extensive ethnographic research materials and oral history interviews were sourced and recor... more From extensive ethnographic research materials and oral history interviews were sourced and recorded on film and audio, which formed the basis of this installation based exhibition. This included the recreation of a 1960/1970s styled front room of Caribbean migrants in the UK as the central installation. This was contextualised by an interactive mixed-media exhibition that included audio-listening posts, archive and specially commissioned films, large scale archive photographs and an extensive programme of workshops, talks and symposia.
Critical Arts, 2017
Recycled in white cultural hegemonic representations of the black male body are colonial fantasie... more Recycled in white cultural hegemonic representations of the black male body are colonial fantasies, based on fear and desire. Yet, in the formation of diasporic black masculinities, these tropes have been subverted and resisted. Diaspora, here, is a performative process of "becoming" (S. Hall. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. London: Harvester, 1993) in a rhizoidal network of aesthetic exchange, transfer, and appropriation (K. Mercer. Welcome to the Jungle. London: Routledge, 1994). Therefore, the sensual, loosely fitting flamboyant suits of poor urban black and Mexican zoot suiters in 1940s America were sartorial antecedents of the "saga bwoys" ("bwoy" in Caribbean vernacular) who as Caribbean migrant men influenced subcultural style in postwar Britain through the subversive power of the "sweet bwoy" and the defiant rebellious style of the "bad bwoy". This continued during the 1960s with the "rude bwoys", who, together with the saga bwoys, are antecedents of contemporary "saggers", who low rise their pants to reveal their underwear. In this article, I explore how saga bwoys, rude bwoys, and saggers used creative agency to subvert tropes that racialise the representation of the diasporic black male body. I draw on Carol Tulloch's ("Style-Fashion-Dress." Fashion Theory 14 (3): 273-304. 2010) triumvirate "style-fashion-dress", Daniel Miller's ("Fashion and Ontology in Trinidad." In Design and Aesthetics. London: Routledge, 1996) transcendent/transient duality in relation to theories of "cool" and creolisation, as well as Stuart Hall's idea of "becoming" to support the formulation of a transdisciplinary conceptual framework.
Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, 2016
I have been always struck by how men of my father’s generation were so well dressed in those icon... more I have been always struck by how men of my father’s generation were so well dressed in those iconic black-and-white documentary photographs depicting their arrival after a three-week transatlantic journey by sea. They wore neatly pressed suits with a white breast pocket handkerchief, polished brogue shoes, white starched shirt with throat-strangling tie, and a trilby hat cocked at an angle. In Eastern Caribbean vernacular they were saga bwoys, or sweet bwoys, masculine personas who, in my rite of passage from a short-pants “colored” boy to a black British young man, I saw as exemplars of good grooming in their sartorial attention to detail as words for the ladies danced off their tongues like Lord Kitchener’s calypso. These “lonely Londoners” would later become Jamaican rude bwoys, swaggering as if to a ska or reggae beat in their two-tone mohair suits, with the attitude and creole chat of the best-dressed chicken on the street. Saga bwoys and rude bwoys are constituents of the contemporary ragamuffin geneology of subcultural black masculine practices that have been self-fashioned in the rhizoid network of racial, transcultural, and diaspora exchange and transfer.Yet limited focus has been given to how and what postwar Caribbean migrant men contributed to a diasporic understanding of black dandyism through the material culture and performativity of the saga bwoys and rude bwoys. Using Carol Tulloch’s “style-fashion-dress,” among other conceptual frameworks, this essay begins to explore the ontology and materiality of a process that saw the aesthetic embodiment and reconstruction of diasporic Caribbeanness in a British context of the dressed black male body—a body that would come to reconfigure the streets of urban Britain with fresh, dynamic masculinities in motion.
Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 2009
West Indian identity was created in the context of Diasporic migration and the West Indian front ... more West Indian identity was created in the context of Diasporic migration and the West Indian front room as the `special' room designated in the domestic interiors of migrants was reserved for guests with restricted access to children. In response to the trauma of displacement, these migrants brought with them a sense of dignity, `good grooming', aspiration and desires for social respectability as remnants of a `colonial time' as suggested by Richard Wilk. The front rooms they created when they eventually acquired homes was based on the Victorian parlour of the Caribbean colonial elite in terms of social function and prescribed behaviour. The West Indian Front Room exhibition curated by Michael McMillan (Geffrye Museum 2005-06) attempts to critique the heritage orientated representation of West Indian migration, which to use Krista A Thompson's and Leon Wright's perspective is a `framed ideal' of the `tropical picturesque'.
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Books by Michael McMillan
In an oral history workshop as part of the installation-based exhibition The Front Room ‘Inna Joburg’ at the FADA Gallery, Johannesburg (2016), black women from Soweto shared stories about the crochet doilies they had made and brought with them, which resonated with me on a trans-diasporic level by invoking memories of how my mother acquired crochet ‘sets’ from friends and work colleagues. They often made their crochet doilies as domestic labourers in the homes of white employers under apartheid in South Africa, and before my mother came to England in 1960, she worked as a maid for a Dutch family for six years in Curacao.
As a form of knitting thread with a hooked needle, black women across the African diaspora have transformed colonialised crochet into colourful three-dimensional sculptural pieces where each doily is unique to the individual maker. This essay will look at how crocheting in the diasporic domestic interior create express postcolonial modernity, aspirations, creative agency, entrepreneurship, creolised aesthetics, femininity, belonging and becoming that challenge and resist colonial representations of black women as not respectable, good spouses and home-makers.
Keywords: crochet, creolisation, creative agency, becoming
Abstract
Within white cultural hegemonic representations of the black male body there is a recycling of colonial fantasies based on fear and desire of ‘the sexual superstud, the athlete, and the rapacious criminal’ (Staples 1982: 4) that still casts an ontological shadow in the formation of diasporic black masculinities. Yet black subjects of African descent have historically played with, subverted and resisted these tropes from dandifying servant’s uniforms to emancipated former slaves expressing their freedom by appropriating the sartorial aesthetics of white middle class gentlemen, who in the eyes of white elites were seen as ‘crimes of fashion’ (Miller 2009).
In a rhizoid network of racial, transcultural and diasporic exchange, transfer and appropriation (Mercer 1995) where diaspora operates as metaphor (Hall 1993) identity is a performative process of ‘becoming’ (Hall 1993) for diasporic black subjectivity. In this diasporic exchange, the postwar migration of Caribbean men to Britain, and the sartorial interventions of the ‘Saga Bwoys’ (bwoy as in Caribbean vernacular). This was later followed by Jamaican men bringing the ‘Rude Bwoys’ from the ghettos of Kingston, Jamaica during the 1960s. The antecedents of the Saga Bwoys and Rude Bwoys are the Zoot Suitors from poor black and Mexican urban areas in 1940s America, who share with the former a sartorial style for sensual loosely fitting flamboyant suits that had the subversive power of the ‘Sweet Bwoy’ (in diasporic vernacular), and the latter the defiant rebellious ‘Bad Bwoy’. Meanwhile, Saga Bwoys and Rude Bwoys are antecedents for contemporary Saggers, who low rise their pants to reveal underwear. This article looks at how Saga Bwoys, Rude Bwoys and Saggers used/use creative agency to resist, play with and transgress tropes that racialise the representation of the diasporic black male body through their embodied material culture. In this analysis, I draw on Carol Tulloch’s (2010) triumvirate style-fashion-dress, Daniel Miller’s (1996) transcendent/transient duality in relation to theories of ‘cool’ and creolisation, as well as Stuart Hall’s (1993) idea of ‘becoming’ to support the formulation of an transdisciplinary conceptual framework.
Keywords: Saga Bwoy, Rude Bwoy, Saggers, ‘style-fashion-dress’, creolisation, cool, transcendent/transient.
The Front Room ‘Inna Joburg’: a hybrid constructed intervention
Emanating from the Victorian parlour the material culture of front rooms created Post War African-Caribbean migrants and later Black British families expresses a tension between the sacred codes of respectability, propriety, and decorum, and the profane stylistic signification of modernity and consumer culture. This formed the basis of an installation-based exhibition The West Indian Front Room: Memories and Impressions of Black British Homes (WIFR) that I guest-curated at the Geffrye Museum, London 2005-06 (McMillan 2005-06). It evoked/invoked a range of responses from a diverse range of audiences that signified their lived experience of the material culture of this ‘special room’ where hospitality towards guests takes place in the domestic interior. In recognition of this inter-cultural appeal subsequent iterations were referred to as The Front Room (TFR). The most recent TFR iteration is an installation-based exhibition entitled The Front Room ‘Inna Joburg’ (TFRiJ) that took place at the FADA Gallery (Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg (UJ)) from 30th June–25th August 2016. It was produced in collaboration with the Visual Identities in Art & Design Research Centre (VIAD) as part of a two-month artist residency that I had during that period. In a post-apartheid Johannesburg contact was made with local Black, Coloured and Indian families (taking account of apartheid’s legacy of racial hierarchies). But unlike previous TFR iterations TFRiJ circumstancses of the residency did not provde the time and space for an organic research process where I normally work peripatetically with local communities to identify and source materials, and gather oral history interviews and archive images that might be used to dress the installation and feature in the exhibition. Rather than carrying out research remotely, it was decided to reconfigure TFRiJ curatorially towards WIFR. This raises questions about the ‘authencity’ of TFRij as an TFR iteration, and therefore, instead of focusing on the end product, this article focuses on the process, by looking at how WIFR’s theoretical framework and other TFR iterations informed the curatorial intentions, as well as what practical strategies were developed to support the curation, production and public engagement activities of TFRiJ. Rather than seeing TFRiJ’s as a replication of WIFR this approach revisits it’s process as a ‘hybrid constructed intervention’.
Migration, Grooming, and Dandyism
Michael McMillan
ABSTRACT
I have been always struck by how men of my father’s generation were so well dressed in those iconic black-and-white documentary photographs depicting their arrival after a three-week transatlantic journey by sea. They wore neatly pressed suits with a white breast pocket handkerchief, polished brogue shoes, white starched shirt with throat-straggling tie, and a trilby hat cocked at an angle. In Eastern Caribbean vernacular they were saga bwoys, or sweet bwoys, masculine personae who, in my rite of passage from a short-pants “colored” boy to a black British young man, I saw as exemplars of good grooming in their sartorial attention to detail as words for the ladies danced off their tongues like Lord Kitchener’s calypso. These “lonely Londoners” would later become Jamaican rude bwoys, swaggering as if to a ska or reggae beat in their two-tone mohair suits with the attitude and creole chat of the best-dressed chicken on the street. Saga bwoys and rude bwoys are constituents of the contemporary raggamuffin geneology of subcultural black masculine practices that have been self-fashioned in the rhizoid network of racial, transcultural, and diaspora exchange and transfer.
Yet, limited focus has been given to how and what postwar Caribbean migrant men contributed to a diasporic understanding of black dandyism through the material culture and performativity of the saga bwoys and rude bwoys. Using Carol Tulloch’s “style-fashion-dress,” among other conceptual frameworks, this essay begins to explore the ontology and materiality of a process that saw the aesthetic embodiment and reconstruction of diasporic Caribbeanness in a British context of the dressed black male body—a body that would come to reconfigure the streets of urban Britain with fresh, dynamic masculinities in motion.
Keywords: saga boy, rude boy, style-fashion-dress, black masculinities, performativity
Papers by Michael McMillan
In an oral history workshop as part of the installation-based exhibition The Front Room ‘Inna Joburg’ at the FADA Gallery, Johannesburg (2016), black women from Soweto shared stories about the crochet doilies they had made and brought with them, which resonated with me on a trans-diasporic level by invoking memories of how my mother acquired crochet ‘sets’ from friends and work colleagues. They often made their crochet doilies as domestic labourers in the homes of white employers under apartheid in South Africa, and before my mother came to England in 1960, she worked as a maid for a Dutch family for six years in Curacao.
As a form of knitting thread with a hooked needle, black women across the African diaspora have transformed colonialised crochet into colourful three-dimensional sculptural pieces where each doily is unique to the individual maker. This essay will look at how crocheting in the diasporic domestic interior create express postcolonial modernity, aspirations, creative agency, entrepreneurship, creolised aesthetics, femininity, belonging and becoming that challenge and resist colonial representations of black women as not respectable, good spouses and home-makers.
Keywords: crochet, creolisation, creative agency, becoming
Abstract
Within white cultural hegemonic representations of the black male body there is a recycling of colonial fantasies based on fear and desire of ‘the sexual superstud, the athlete, and the rapacious criminal’ (Staples 1982: 4) that still casts an ontological shadow in the formation of diasporic black masculinities. Yet black subjects of African descent have historically played with, subverted and resisted these tropes from dandifying servant’s uniforms to emancipated former slaves expressing their freedom by appropriating the sartorial aesthetics of white middle class gentlemen, who in the eyes of white elites were seen as ‘crimes of fashion’ (Miller 2009).
In a rhizoid network of racial, transcultural and diasporic exchange, transfer and appropriation (Mercer 1995) where diaspora operates as metaphor (Hall 1993) identity is a performative process of ‘becoming’ (Hall 1993) for diasporic black subjectivity. In this diasporic exchange, the postwar migration of Caribbean men to Britain, and the sartorial interventions of the ‘Saga Bwoys’ (bwoy as in Caribbean vernacular). This was later followed by Jamaican men bringing the ‘Rude Bwoys’ from the ghettos of Kingston, Jamaica during the 1960s. The antecedents of the Saga Bwoys and Rude Bwoys are the Zoot Suitors from poor black and Mexican urban areas in 1940s America, who share with the former a sartorial style for sensual loosely fitting flamboyant suits that had the subversive power of the ‘Sweet Bwoy’ (in diasporic vernacular), and the latter the defiant rebellious ‘Bad Bwoy’. Meanwhile, Saga Bwoys and Rude Bwoys are antecedents for contemporary Saggers, who low rise their pants to reveal underwear. This article looks at how Saga Bwoys, Rude Bwoys and Saggers used/use creative agency to resist, play with and transgress tropes that racialise the representation of the diasporic black male body through their embodied material culture. In this analysis, I draw on Carol Tulloch’s (2010) triumvirate style-fashion-dress, Daniel Miller’s (1996) transcendent/transient duality in relation to theories of ‘cool’ and creolisation, as well as Stuart Hall’s (1993) idea of ‘becoming’ to support the formulation of an transdisciplinary conceptual framework.
Keywords: Saga Bwoy, Rude Bwoy, Saggers, ‘style-fashion-dress’, creolisation, cool, transcendent/transient.
The Front Room ‘Inna Joburg’: a hybrid constructed intervention
Emanating from the Victorian parlour the material culture of front rooms created Post War African-Caribbean migrants and later Black British families expresses a tension between the sacred codes of respectability, propriety, and decorum, and the profane stylistic signification of modernity and consumer culture. This formed the basis of an installation-based exhibition The West Indian Front Room: Memories and Impressions of Black British Homes (WIFR) that I guest-curated at the Geffrye Museum, London 2005-06 (McMillan 2005-06). It evoked/invoked a range of responses from a diverse range of audiences that signified their lived experience of the material culture of this ‘special room’ where hospitality towards guests takes place in the domestic interior. In recognition of this inter-cultural appeal subsequent iterations were referred to as The Front Room (TFR). The most recent TFR iteration is an installation-based exhibition entitled The Front Room ‘Inna Joburg’ (TFRiJ) that took place at the FADA Gallery (Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg (UJ)) from 30th June–25th August 2016. It was produced in collaboration with the Visual Identities in Art & Design Research Centre (VIAD) as part of a two-month artist residency that I had during that period. In a post-apartheid Johannesburg contact was made with local Black, Coloured and Indian families (taking account of apartheid’s legacy of racial hierarchies). But unlike previous TFR iterations TFRiJ circumstancses of the residency did not provde the time and space for an organic research process where I normally work peripatetically with local communities to identify and source materials, and gather oral history interviews and archive images that might be used to dress the installation and feature in the exhibition. Rather than carrying out research remotely, it was decided to reconfigure TFRiJ curatorially towards WIFR. This raises questions about the ‘authencity’ of TFRij as an TFR iteration, and therefore, instead of focusing on the end product, this article focuses on the process, by looking at how WIFR’s theoretical framework and other TFR iterations informed the curatorial intentions, as well as what practical strategies were developed to support the curation, production and public engagement activities of TFRiJ. Rather than seeing TFRiJ’s as a replication of WIFR this approach revisits it’s process as a ‘hybrid constructed intervention’.
Migration, Grooming, and Dandyism
Michael McMillan
ABSTRACT
I have been always struck by how men of my father’s generation were so well dressed in those iconic black-and-white documentary photographs depicting their arrival after a three-week transatlantic journey by sea. They wore neatly pressed suits with a white breast pocket handkerchief, polished brogue shoes, white starched shirt with throat-straggling tie, and a trilby hat cocked at an angle. In Eastern Caribbean vernacular they were saga bwoys, or sweet bwoys, masculine personae who, in my rite of passage from a short-pants “colored” boy to a black British young man, I saw as exemplars of good grooming in their sartorial attention to detail as words for the ladies danced off their tongues like Lord Kitchener’s calypso. These “lonely Londoners” would later become Jamaican rude bwoys, swaggering as if to a ska or reggae beat in their two-tone mohair suits with the attitude and creole chat of the best-dressed chicken on the street. Saga bwoys and rude bwoys are constituents of the contemporary raggamuffin geneology of subcultural black masculine practices that have been self-fashioned in the rhizoid network of racial, transcultural, and diaspora exchange and transfer.
Yet, limited focus has been given to how and what postwar Caribbean migrant men contributed to a diasporic understanding of black dandyism through the material culture and performativity of the saga bwoys and rude bwoys. Using Carol Tulloch’s “style-fashion-dress,” among other conceptual frameworks, this essay begins to explore the ontology and materiality of a process that saw the aesthetic embodiment and reconstruction of diasporic Caribbeanness in a British context of the dressed black male body—a body that would come to reconfigure the streets of urban Britain with fresh, dynamic masculinities in motion.
Keywords: saga boy, rude boy, style-fashion-dress, black masculinities, performativity