Fashion on the Frontier

Masculinity, Migration and Modernities in the Brazilian Amazon

Abstract

In 1910, on the cusp of the rubber fever that gripped South America, New York photographer Dana Bertran Merrill was hired to document the transnational construction of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad, built deep in the Brazilian Amazon. His camera acted both as witness to, and abettor in, this imperial project of US capitalist expansion and exploitation of South America. Although Merrill was not employed to document the transnational clothing culture of the transient frontier society that sprang up around the construction of the railroad, his commissioned photographs overflow with visual information on dress: what people wore, and how they wore it, documented in extraordinary detail. Turning to fashion offers a revised lens into how Merrill’s predominantly male subjects, who had journeyed to the Amazon from over 52 nations, used clothing to construct their identities and position themselves in relation to one another in the remote and uninviting location. Merrill’s archive provides an unusual case study for the historian to critically evaluate the colonial and neocolonial devaluation of labour upon which early-twentieth century projects of industrial modernity such as the Madeira-Mamoré railroad were predicated. Grounded in the visual analysis of fashion, this article builds upon feminist philosopher Saidiya Hartman’s revisionist method of ‘critical fabulation’, which deviates from traditional historiography in its efforts to overcome significant acts of erasure within the historical record. In bridging the visual and sensory aspects of fashion, it presents new insights into fashion’s histories as well as those of photography at its intersection with global projects of industrial capitalism.