Fashion at the Frontier
Photography, Time, and Colonial Modernity on Brazil's Madeira-Mamoré Railroad
Fashion at the Frontier
Photography, Time, and Colonial Modernity on Brazil's Madeira-Mamoré Railroad
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Description
Revisiting Dana Bertran Merrill's remarkable archive, this innovative interrogation of photographs of the anonymous workforce who built the Madeira-Mamoré railroad reveals how fashion inhabited a landscape defined by extractive capitalism, transnational migration, and uneven networks of power.
Bringing fashion studies into conversation with photography and the histories of labor and colonialism, it foregrounds the presence of migrant labourers from across the globe, Caribbean washerwomen, North American contractors, Brazilian engineers and sanitarians, and Indigenous communities. The result is a vivid account of how the camera both reinforced and unsettled racialised systems of classification and control.
Fashion at the Frontier offers fresh perspectives on fashion, time and archival silence, opening up new ways of understanding dress within the wider histories of Latin America and global modernity.
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: Leaving the station
A late arrival
Emphases and erasures
Railroad tracks
Boom to bust
Modernities
The passenger list
Archival patchwork
Listening to clothes
Chapter outline
1. Fashion, time, and global capitalism
Chronos and kairos
Complicity and critique
The commodity frontier
Railroad time
Uniform time
Work time
Fashion time
Photographic time
Merrill's album
2. Timekeeping and ingrained time
Fashioning the frontier
Laborious histories of labor
Colonizing time, space, and bodies
Marks of wear and tear
Following a thread
Lingering, malingering
3. Laundering and dirty laundry
Dressing for the tropics
Laundering the truth
Speed and sanitation
Fashioning whiteness
Whiteness in material form
Dirty laundry
4. Whitening and whiteness
Entangled modernities
Different shades of white
Sanitizing Rio
Racialized frontiers
A mirage of modernity
Not quite white
Whiteness as a façade
5. Women's time: on the threshold
Domesticating the jungle
The home
The hospital
Centering Blackness
The steam laundry
A photographic fragment
The presence of absence
Afterword: End of the line
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Product details
| Published | Oct 15 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Hardback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 288 |
| ISBN | 9781350286726 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Visual Arts |
| Illustrations | up to 50 b&w illus |
| Dimensions | 234 x 156 mm |
| Series | Fashion: Visual & Material Interconnections |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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