Introduction

In 1634, the Massachusetts Bay Court put forth its first sumptuary law:

For the members of this newly established colony, the message imparted in the law was clear: one’s identity as a Puritan was tied to modest dress, without excess, tied to one’s religion, status, and wealth. Modest dress according to these guidelines was intended for all members, including English and Indigenous men and women who had adopted or were forced to adopt the new religion. To dress outside of the manner dictated by the Bay Colony laws meant that one lived outside of Puritan ideologies—such as Indigenous peoples who were not converted—and outside of social order expected in the early colony where dress identified who you were. Yet colonial order rarely matches colonial reality, where people often lived in between imperial ideologies. That aspect of lived colonialism is found in the material record of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and elsewhere in other settler colonial contexts, in the entanglement of different peoples, objects, and ideologies. Homi Bhabha reminds us of two aspects of lived colonialisms that threaten imperial order: hybridity and mimicry. Notably, hybridities of materiality, identity, ideology, and practice that diverge from imperial expectations, and semblances of mimicry that are a form of mockery and menace.