In this talk, Jonathan Michael Square explores how the production and circulation of “negro cloth”—inexpensive, coarse textiles like Lowell cloth—reveal the deep entanglement of slavery and industrial capitalism in nineteenth-century Massachusetts. Drawing from his ongoing research and forthcoming book Negro Cloth: How Slavery Birthed the American Fashion Industry, Square traces how textiles manufactured in the industrial North were used to clothe enslaved people in the plantation South, with particular attention to the material realities of those forced to wear and often produce such fabrics. Through archival sources, WPA narratives, and textile samples, the talk examines how discomfort and durability shaped the lived experience of bondage, while also illuminating the ways enslaved individuals asserted aesthetic agency under duress. Ultimately, Square argues that the history of American fashion is inseparable from the history of slavery with “negro cloth” serving as a material through line.
A Material Culture of Africa and the African Diaspora Lecture
Dr. Jonathan Michael Square is the assistant professor of Black visual culture at Parsons School of Design. He earned a PhD from New York University, an MA from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA from Cornell University. Previously, he taught in the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature at Harvard University and was a fellow in the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He curated the exhibition Past Is Present: Black Artists Respond to the Complicated Histories of Slavery at the Herron School of Art and Design, which closed in January 2023, and cocurated Revolisyon Toupatou at Parsons School of Design alongside Siobhan Meï. Most recently, he had a show up titled Almost Unknown, The Afric-American Picture Gallery at the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, on view May 3, 2025–January 4, 2026. A proponent of the use of social media as a form of radical pedagogy, Dr. Square also leads the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom.
