Confederates in Cool: Oscar Wilde and Jack Johnson

Abstract

This article examines Oscar Wilde’s contribution to the development of a particularly contemporary sensibility or attitude, in which the dominant aesthetic category is not art but style. This sensibility is crystallised most clearly in the figure of the dandy, and the paper will locate Wilde’s dandyism in a continuum from Charles Baudelaire through Salvador Dalí to modern artists and celebrities such as David Bowie and Miles Davis. With a particular focus on Wilde’s appearance before American audiences on his 1882 lecture tour, I shall also argue that Wilde’s cultivation of dandyism  is analogous with black ‘Cool’, and that it is the basis for his continuing ‘afterlife’ in contemporary culture.