Fashioning Insurrection

From Imperial Resistance To American Orientalisms
✖ an archer dressed in Indian costume fighting British soldiers in red coats.

About the Exhibit

Americans have adapted uniforms into costumes since the masquerade balls of colonial days to today’s historical films and battle reenactments. The practice took an unexpected form in the first decades following the American Revolution when the early presses of the United States closely covered imperial insurrections that unfolded across Islamicate societies against the three towering empires of the era: the Greek War of Independence against the Ottomans (1821–29), the Ottoman Algerian resistance to the French (1830–48), and the Indian uprising against the British (1857). Alongside depictions of these struggles, American popular media paid careful attention to the “national” dress and military uniforms that could potentially unify a revolution or even aid in controlling insurrection. As the young nation navigated its connections to the Islamicate world, some reinterpreted visual and sartorial modes of imperial resistance. The reverberations of these events led to the emergence of orientalist costumes and dress that transformed regional revolutionary garb into American fashion statements of solidarity, fascination, and emulation.
Through these forms of cosmopolitan materialism, Americans announced their political stances on historic movements, sometimes also asserting their country’s imperial ambitions and legacies as it solidified its standing in the world. Such sartorial translations from uniforms to fashion informed America’s evolving relationship with its own revolutionary past. Each medium these costumes inhabited aided Americans in creatively redefining their country’s transforming identity on the international stage while facing resonant issues in their new nation, including foreign trade, slavery, and humanitarianism. Alongside contextualizing documents, the works here vividly illustrate how the U.S. wielded these movements of imperial insurrection to remold its own world image and don it with aplomb.

About the Exhibit

Orientalist Legacies of Algeria in the American Civil War

Approximately 30,000 soldiers fought as Zouaves in the American Civil War, primarily a part of volunteer militia units rather than professional battalions. Much like the French, Americans praised Zouave uniforms for their practicality, which freed soldiers from the restrictions of traditional infantry attire and gave them greater mobility. This transatlantic adaptation transformed a fighting force created from the subjugation of North Africa into a new image of alterity, which appealed to the expansionist United States, defined by racial politics of slavery. Much like their European counterparts, popular theatrical incarnations of this costume, known as zouaverie, also emerged across the U.S. Some Americans, however, did not forget the Zouave origins in the French conquest of Algeria. By the early post-war era, Black militia companies embraced the Zouave uniform as an emblem of an African military tradition. The Hannibal Zouaves, founded in Chicago in 1868, adopted this attire to assert an African martial lineage in public enactments of Black citizenship.

Ceremonial Civil War-era Tiffany sword presented in May 1863 to Col. Rush Hawkins, who led the 9th New York Volunteers — “Hawkins’ Zouaves” — during the first two years of the Civil War. The sword includes a figure of a Zouave carved into the grip and a list of the 9th New York Volunteers’ battles inscribed along the blade. cover illustration of officers and soldiers outdoors wearing zouave uniforms. Zouave regiment marching through city street; framed by flags at right and left sides; men (including a Mason), women and child watching New York Zouave stands in front of a fort with the Union flag flying, holding a rifle. Under is an inscription: child in zouave costume, 3/4-length, waving flag and small sword.