Dress and a Fashioned Identity among Black South African Migrant Miners in the Mid-Twentieth Century.

The degree to which the development of migrancy as a way of life for men in South Africa affected the ways in which people fashioned their identity through dress constitutes the core of this article. The history of the development and adaptation of particular forms of dress is traced, with variations considered, following Mikhail Bakhtin (Speech Genres and Other Late Essays.Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), as speech/dress acts within specific speech/ dress genres. Black miners are shown to have adopted a tripartite set of identities in colonial and apartheid times; these are, as Achille Mbembe (On the Postcolony. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2015) argues, interlocking rather than chronologically separate and sequenced. They included the “traditional”, associated with rural homes; the specifically ethnic, associated with performative mine spectacles; and the modern, manifested in the urbane returnee to the “homeland”. These three interchangeable identities traverse a period from the late 1800s to the present. Focusing (but not exclusively) on mid-twentieth-century miners from the eastern seaboard of South Africa and their beadwork—often considered as one of the main markers of ethnicity—it is argued that these dress genres, interwoven and changing, are part of their fashioning of a modern masculine identity. The archive used here is largely photographic, and so visual analysis and historical contextualisation are the methodological tools employed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]