Content area
Abstract
African Americans have an interest in their cultural and ethnic heritage. One method of gaining information about African American heritage is by examining historical images of African American women in relation to appearance. Unfortunately sources pertaining to African American appearance are limited. The purpose of this research was to use descriptions of appearance (dress and the body) in slave narratives, define themes relative to appearance, and assess aspects of appearance of African American persons during the period of slavery in North America. Content analysis and Bathes' system for analyzing written garments were used to collect data from the references to appearance (dress and the body) in the slave narratives written by African American women. A purposive sample of ten slave narratives was subjected to both methods of data collection. Findings included the identification of binary themes that provided meanings of African American slave dress in the narratives. These included poverty/wealth, utilities/luxuries, purity/impurity, sadness/cheerfulness, conspicuous/inconspicuous, and comfortable/uncomfortable. Three superordinate categories emerged: Status, Physical Well-Being and Psychological Well-Being. Two theoretical models emerged from the research: (1) Symbols of African American Dress in Female Slave Narratives which described the binary themes describing African American slave dress and (2) Symbolic Meaning of Appearance of African American Slaves in the Nineteenth Century United States which described the interconnectedness of the superordinate themes describing the meanings of African American slave appearances. The Conditional Matrix of African American Slaves in Nineteenth Century Slave Narratives was constructed to evaluate the superordinate themes. The contribution of this study is the understanding of symbols of African American dress and appearance and the construction of grounded theory with applicability to the study of communicative effects of African American dress and appearance at other social times and social contexts and for male clothing.
