17 thoughts on “Interview With the Creator of Black Girl in a Big Dress

  1. Thank you, FrockFlicks, for bringing this delightful endeavor to my attention! I await the continuation with eager anticipation!

  2. YES! I saw some eps and loved this but lost track and didn’t finish… Well, I’ve seen it all now, and it’s all awesome. :-) There are a lot of moments where I feel like Adrienne speaks for all of us history-loving women, and I appreciate the ones where I get a glimpse at the presumptions that she faces. Clever and super enjoyable. I will make sure I subscribe on YouTube so I don’t miss the next season. :-)

  3. I LOOOOOVE BGBD! I found it online some months ago and started watching the first episode. About 30 seconds in I was yelling to my roommate “Get over here now!” We just parked right in front of my laptop at the kitchen table and watched the series, laughing until we cried. There is so much to love about this show. I can’t wait for more.

  4. Thank you for posting this! I enjoyed every episode that I may or may not have just binge watched, and immediately sent the link to a friend of mine that I think will enjoy it too!

  5. I am definitely going to watch this. The blue dress is so totally awesome.

  6. Regarding the rap/hip hip/inner city thing, it’s a massive peeve of mine when people insist black people are a monolith. It’s not my experience, yet people, including black ones tell me I’m in the wrong. @#$%

    Will add this to my list of things to watch.

    1. Same! This was great! I just binged it and sent the link for the show to several friends!

  7. Whoo! I just posted a link to this on my gothic lolita group page. This right up our alley! (And as someone whose last cosplay needed a full wedding petticoat plus panniers, I can totally relate to trying to get in a car. My solution? We’re what you can to the event, but stash the petti and pannier in the truck to quickly slip on in the parking lot. I’m cover by five layers of poof and bloomers, so no harm. Plus weirder things go on at a con, so people really don’t bat an eye at it)

  8. This is a truly wonderful and unique show. Adrienne/Lady Katherine struggles to find Mr Darcy err Mr Right is humourous and a telling point in today’s society. I’m a bit like Adrienne, I prefer old world charms and a courtship period.
    Can’t wait to see season 2

  9. Just some info & quotes to explicate why the lack of diversity in these historical costume dramas isn’t really innocent and is quite calculated and should be viewed skeptically:

    “DUFF, a surname adopted from the Celtic, in which language the word means BLACK. Sibbald, in his History of Fife, says, ”that as NIGER and RUFUS were names of families amongst the Romans, from the COLOUR AND COMPLEXION OF MEN , so it seems Duff was, from the SWARTHY AND BLACK COLOUR OF THOSE OF THE TRIBE,” or clan of Macduff. DUFF, king of Scotland, son of Malcolm the First, succeeded Indulph in 961. The name was Odo, according to Pinkerton. By the Celtic part of his subjects he was surnamed Duff, or THE BLACK” – The Scottish nation; or, The surnames, families, literature, honours, and biographical history of the people of Scotland (1877) by William Anderson

    “I shall only remark here upon the name Duff, that as Niger and Rufus were names of families amongst the Romans, from the colour and complexion of men, so it seems Duff was from the swarthy and black colour of these of the tribe.” – The history, ancient and modern, of the sheriffdoms of Fife and Kinross (1803) by Sir Robert Sibbald

    “Duffy. Dub, black ; cac, an individual. A black person.” – Family names from the Irish, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman and Scotch considered in relation to their etymology (1892) by Thomas G. Gentry

  10. “In looking over the books, he was surprised to find a statement, not one, but many, in proof of the allegation that the Irish tongue had been spoken, and was still understood, in Africa. Of these, he would mention two— one was, that an Irish-speaking person penetrated through Africa, even to Ashantee, being thoroughly understood, and the other in which an African without any European education was able to read Irish manuscripts, and to converse with Irish-speaking people in this country” – Ereuna : or, An Investigation of the Etymons of words and names, classical and scriptural, through the medium of Celtic, together with some remarks on Hebraeo-Celtic affinities (1875) by Celtophile

    “The Welsh tend to be small and dark, descended – so it has been alleged and subsequently, I believe, disproved – from people of Iberian stock who migrated from Asia when the world was young. I have just read in a book of 1903 that the primeval population belonged to what is called Hamitic stock represented by ancient Egyptian and modern Berber, and that many words common to Welsh and Hebrew are borrowed from the Tongue of the Hamitic people….for I went to Egypt a few years ago and people kept saying to me, “If you’re Welsh you’re going to enjoy this soup” (pressing upon me a green liquid the ingredients of which I could not begin to recognise), or, “If you’re Welsh you will like this monument.” I couldn’t think what they were talking about, but then I began to discern similarities between Welsh and Egyptian in the family structures, the most marked being the preponderance of aunties common to both peoples…When I came home I read about a ‘new’ theory that the Welsh and the Berbers share the same blood group to an unusual degree. And death. The Welsh — or their ancestors, whoever they may have been — and the ancient Egyptians felt the same way about death. The master idea in both their religions was the cult of ancestors, and the menhir and the obelisk have much in common. The dolmen, the burial mound, expresses the same concern with the afterlife as the tombs in the Valley of the Kings.” – A Welsh Childhood (1990) by Alice Thomas Ellis.

    “There is no such enemy to a black skin as your Anglo-Saxon who has done so much for liberty.” – William Howard Russell

    A website run by a Welshman discussing these issues and why some Irish, Scottish, & Welsh don’t really like to be associated with the English and the U.K. and call themselves British after the indigenous Celtic people of the British Isles: http:// robt. shepherd. tripod. com /welsh.html

  11. I love studying human history, but the way that documentaries and historical films & TV literally harass The Tudor Era and the Six Wives of Henry VIII over and over again is not only worn-out, stale, and boring, it’s also suspect because false narratives of history and humanity are habitually utilized as propaganda to prop up fraudulent ideologies (like patriarchy and racism) that justify systemic socio-political oppression. Honestly, I’d LOVE to see a mainstream film about how patriarchy TRULY started, but it’ll probably never happen – even though the truth is often stranger and more interesting than fiction. If we examined patriarchy, we’d actually be able to better understand it’s monstrous results in someone like Henry VIII. Anyway, when you literally fixate on one historical era from one country’s perspective (England) and then export images of that historical era and your particular culture’s (English) language, ideologies, beliefs, and concepts that are very loaded with a particular social and political agenda stretching back hundreds of years all around the globe, it’s suspect. Human societies and thus our “interpretations” of human history were FIRST dickwashed and then whitewashed. If we all truly want rectify some of the gross inequalities we see in our contemporary societies, telling the truth about human history (in our educational systems and in our media depictions and imagery of human history) is the place to start.

    Furthermore, the intellectually lazy and short-sighted miscreants who can’t come with up better lie than “too much diversity/inclusion is unpopular” are simply showing how lazy, stale, boring, and close-minded they are. We wouldn’t know if diversity & inclusion are really “unpopular” because we’ve barely experienced this so-called “diversity” and “inclusion” in any meaningful and sustained way on a LARGE scale (especially if we look at most of the people in gate-keeping, powerful, decision making positions in the U.S. and elsewhere in the “West.”) Tokenism and one-dimensional stereotypes don’t count. The reprobates who keep propagating that asinine “too much diversity is unpopular” lie just shouldn’t be allowed to have access to any powerful or important decision-making positions anywhere in society, let alone in the entertainment and media industries – that is what would solve the “diversity” problem permanently.

    1. MD, I recommend the book “At the Root of This Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst” by Carol L. Flinders. Part of the book discusses the origins of patriarchy in a cogent way. The book was written in the 1990s, and so there is probably more recent writing on this phenomenon, however, that is the only book I’ve read to date on the subject.

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