My initial response to this question was to present my project as one of rectification. I would rectify what appeared to be the omissions of slavery and the phenomenology of blackness from the dominant histories and discourses of modernity by bringing the political economy of slavery into a direct confrontation with narratives about aesthetic judgment and taste in philosophy, social history, and cultural criticism. My objective was to locate slavery at the core of Englishness and debates about English identity and thus reconceive what was considered marginal to the project of modern self-making as essential to its identity. But this initial premise was preempted by the emergence of new revisionist studies in eighteenth-century culture and imperial history. Indeed, slightly earlier attempts to rethink the history of empire, most notably Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation and Nussbaum and Brown's The New Eighteenth Century, had already begun to question traditional assumptions about the historiography of the period. Colley had noted how after 1707 the British came to define themselves as “a single people not because of any political or cultural consensus at home, but rather in reaction to the Other beyond their shores.”129 Others had turned to literary theory to try to pry eighteenth-century studies from what has come to be termed “a Whiggish teleology.”130
The critique here was directed at the general insistence on a continuous and stable history and culture in the eighteenth century, one in which the relationship between centers and margins was intelligible and unchanging, one driven by what Nussbaum and Brown describe as “a political stability linked to an image of equivalent social and cultural coherence, to a sense of an unchallenged class hierarchy represented and perpetuated in a literary culture where aesthetics, ethics, and politics perfectly mesh.”131 Subsequent new histories of empire sought to undo this ideology of order and coherence to account for what has been described as “non-elite and non-western pasts” and to recognize empire as a site of interconnection and interdependence, and the search was on for a method to “disrupt oppositions between metropolis and colony and allow us to rethink the genealogies and historiographies of national belonging and exclusion.”132
All of these new histories and studies brought about a significant correction, if not balance, in the study of the European self and its colonial others in several areas, which provides an important backdrop for my project. But they also raised a new set of questions and indeed seemed to redefine the problematic of difference in the culture of modernity in terms I did not always find adequate to the task of accounting for the figure of the slave in modern culture. Three of these problems are crucial to bringing the culture of taste and the political economy of slavery into a productive encounter: the tension between the epistemological framework and logic of the modern and the existential life of the enslaved and colonized; the paradigm of difference in an age of cultural hybridity; and the problematic of race in general and blackness in particular in the elaboration of British theories of taste. Let me take each problem in turn.
The Epistemological Framework of Modernity
As I have already noted, the most compelling scholarly work on the culture of modernity has been driven by the imperative to recover the lives and experiences of subjects outside what has been described as “the political and epistemological models of Enlightenment and modernist Europe.”133 Revisionist histories and studies of modernity have not set out to undo epistemological frameworks as such; they are part of a project whose goal is to dilate their boundaries and terms of reference, to pluralize the range of experiences that are the objects of investigation, stepping out of the universalizing and universalized structures of knowledge to recover the signs of what Dror Warhman aptly calls “the unstructured institutions” that “underlay people's fundamental assumptions about who they were and who they could be.”134 And to the extent that epistemologies imply justified beliefs and knowable categories, they depend on visible experiences and stable entities—they need structured frameworks. Indeed, in Wahrman's The Making of the Modern Self, the pasts that are recovered from the margins were those that had left either “unself-conscious traces” or “unintended marks.”135 And these traces and marks would become historical when they were rewritten within a set of norms, brought under the rule of what Foucault once called a “procedural rationality.”136
But traces are not enough. As I will show in the second half of this book, slaves left many traces and marks, both conscious and unconscious in form and nature. From birth to death, from occult practices to dance and fashion, there is no aspect of the experiences of African slaves in Europe and the Americas that has not been reconstructed through the traces they left behind and the glimpses of their lives that are available to us in the archive of the masters.137 At the same time, however, the bodies of slaves, their lives, and their activities were considered to be outside the rationality of modernity and its normative order and thus outside the epistemological framework of the modern. This does not mean that the lives of slaves were not represented in the grid of modern identity. Slaves occupy an important part in the explanatory structures of modernity from natural history to the aesthetic. But they exist in this framework as proof of their incapacity for modern identity. They are, in effect, constituted as unmodern subjects or simply objects of modern trade. Concerning epistemological frameworks, then, the following question remains outstanding and inescapable: What are we to make of the faint traces of the slaves and the marks that are often only available to us through the narratives of their masters? How do we speak of those events and experiences that Toni Morrison identifies as the disturbing element of “black surrogacy”?138 Or as Joan Dayan asks in Haiti, History, and the Gods, how are we to deal with “those reactions that did not get written down?”139
These questions have been asked by others in different forms. In Contradictory Omens Jamaican poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite was one of the first to raise the question of visibility and invisibility in the slaves' articulation of their existence in relation to the dominant world of masters who had written massive histories with the goal of affirming the inhumanity of the slave within the rational order of the Enlightenment.140 In her provocative essay “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe,” Hortense Spillers reflects on the consequences of the slaves' “veritable descent into the loss of communicative force.”141 Who tells the stories of the enslaved and how are they told? That is the question raised by Jenny Sharpe in the Ghosts of Slavery?142 And making her way into the archive of slavery, Saidiya Hartman would discover that nothing in her training had prepared her for the invisible and the phantasmal, “those who had left no record of their lives and whose biography consisted of the terrible things said about them or done to them.”143
I cite these books on slavery by literary and cultural scholars not to privilege one discipline over another but to call attention to two further points. First, the history or story of slavery that is told and circulated functions under the rubric of a disciplinary order, each part of which has its own claims and counterclaims, openings and closures. Culture and literary scholars like those cited above—and I include myself in this category as well—will not contribute much in terms of epistemology if by this term we mean “the categories that structure our thought, pattern our arguments and proofs, and certify our standards of explanation.”144 The questions that I find compelling will not have answers, evidence, or proof, nor will they satisfy any standard of explanation, because my objects of analysis—slavery and enslavement—are surrounded by silence and are submerged under what Patrick Chamoiseau, the Martinican novelist, has called a “web of memories which scorch us with things forgotten and screaming presences.”145
Second, it is clear to me that one of the reasons that slavery could not be included in the discourse of taste, even when it pervaded its cultural forms, is because it was not compatible with the epistemological categories that defined high culture. As I will show in several key moments in this book, the establishment of a realm of taste, or even the valorization of ideals of beauty, depended on system
atic acts of excluding those considered to be outside the systems of explanation that were being established as social norms. My goal here is not to establish an alternative normativity built around the marginalized, but to understand how the “formation of a vocabulary of the pure and impure” functioned as the linguistic and semantic foundation for modern identity.146 I will be reading the figure of the slave as the informing yet interdicted symbolic in the representation of the culture of taste, outside or excessive of the epistemological framework of modernity.
But my refusal to privilege an epistemological framework should not be construed as obliviousness to the temporality of empire and its ever-changing boundaries. I recognize that theories and practices of empire changed often during the long history of the modern period, as did the general understanding of the condition of enslavement. Comprehending the plurality of empire is indeed essential to accounting for its omissions. Here I concur with those scholars, most notably Kathleen Wilson, who argue that there were many imperial projects in the Georgian period that were “engaged with by planters, reformers, merchants, explorers, missionaries, settlers, adventurers, indigenes, and the enslaved,” and that there was “no universal colonial condition or imperial experience, but discrete practices of power and ways of imagining it in specific historical periods.”147 Within this changing empire, the condition of the slave in the public imagination would depend on shifting interests, ideologies, and practices. The slave who entered the realm of the British empire in the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the trade was very much accepted as a quotidian aspect of imperial trade, was not the figure we would encounter at the end of the century or at the beginning of the nineteenth, when abolitionism transformed the terms of debate and representation. We will see these differences at play in what I have called the changing aura of blackness.
And yet the moral economy of slavery tended to retain some enduring and often singular elements. African slaves, often because of their color or other forms of difference, continued to occupy “a savage slot” in the European imagination.148 English attitudes toward slavery were changing continuously, and quite often the most pernicious and brutal images of the Africans deployed by agents of the slave trade and its apologists coexisted with some of the most benign representations. At the same time, however, both of these images could be found in earlier periods, existing in an old and enduring archive of Africanism that could be deployed to respond to the contingencies of the moment. The violent images of the Africans in the works of slave agents such as Robert Norris and Archibald Dalzell, published at the end of the eighteenth century to mount a rearguard action against abolitionism, belonged to a specific moment in the 1790s, but they were also rehearsals of earlier portraits by an older generation of slave factors, most notably, William Bosman, whose words opened my reflections in this chapter.
If I seem to prefer working with emaciated temporal frames rather than epistemological frameworks, it is because I believe that working with a weak sense of history or with porous boundaries is one way of liberating the slave not from history but from the hold of historicism. Long ago, the planter class laid claim to historicism as one of its authorizing agents. Similarly, if I locate this book in what might seem to be an amorphous geography, it is not because I am not aware of the differences between the culture of taste in England and Scotland or Virginia, or because I am impervious to the variety of localities in which slavery operated and shaped its landscapes; rather, I want to underscore the large projects that animated both the project of Enlightenment (which posited itself as English, Scottish, and British, but also European) and the almost universal assumption that the enslaved African, whether he or she lived in Bristol, England, or Bristol, Jamaica, was the counterpoint to modernity itself.
The Paradigm of Difference
My project also sets out to rethink the paradigm of difference, without doubt a key concern of the new imperial histories, literary and global studies, and postcolonial theory. Difference has become a key paradigm in the project of rethinking modernity and Enlightenment. In fact, one could argue that nearly all revisionist and postmodern accounts of modern identity have been attempts to wage war against the totalitarianism of modern rationality by activating differences.149 In literature and cultural studies, it is impossible to escape from the poststructuralist critique of Enlightenment rationality, its universal claims, and its rejection of what Jean-François Lyotard called metanarratives. In fact, Lyotard has defined the postmodern as “incredulity toward metanarratives,” insisting, in his famous report to the government of Quebec, that the narrative function has lost its “its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal.”150 Writing in the same vein and spirit, Michel Foucault would pose the essential question for the West at the end of the colonial era: what right “did its culture, its science, its social organization have to laying claim to a universal validity?”151 Here, the difference of the “Third World” would be deployed against “Reason—the despotic enlightenment.”152
As I have already noted, revisionist accounts of modern British identity have sought to recover the repressed and unheroic histories of others, including women, slaves, workers, and to make them alternative factors in what are often presented as small stories. As scholars have sought to question and displace the mythical centers of Britishness and to undo the fulcrum that has sustained the mythology of English identity, cosmopolitanism, and empire, they have turned to the lives of those located on the margins and peripheries of empire for evidence of the instability of the center.153 A turn to the periphery of the eighteenth century thus becomes part of an attempt “to broaden and sharpen our perspectives on the period and its critical tradition as well” and to supply “a more inclusive view of the period than those which are limited to the dominant culture alone.”154 An axiom of difference reroutes the history of empire in terms best described by Catherine Hall in Civilising Subjects:
The time of empire was the time when anatomies of difference were being elaborated, across the axes of class, race and gender. These elaborations were the work of culture, for the categories were discursive, and their meanings historically contingent. The language of class emerged as a way of making sense of the new industrial society in Britain of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The language of “separate spheres” became a common way of talking about and categorising sexual difference in this same period of transition. It was colonial encounters which produced a new category, race, the meanings of which, like those of class and gender, have always shifted and been contested and challenged. The Enlightenment inaugurated a debate about racial types, and natural scientists began to make human races an object of study, labouring to produce a schema out of the immense varieties of human life, within a context of relatively few physical variations.155
And a fundamental question remains unanswered here and elsewhere: could this idiom of difference escape the imperial center's capacity to generate and manage categories of alterity?
Empire, of course, produced alterity in order to secure the identity of the domestic self, and the paradigm of difference and hybridity that some critics now seem to endorse as a source of agency and restitution often functioned as a mechanism for consolidating the center in the face of the real or imagined danger posed by the other. We can take it as axiomatic that when the English, at home or abroad, turned to the identity of others, it was to reflect on, or even endorse, their own unique identities, that the space of alterity enabled what Edward Said has termed the “consolidated vision of empire.”156 Fictional accounts of Englishness in the modern period (and the same case could be made for earlier ones) were driven by the need to enhance the nature and meaning of Englishness against the symbolic danger represented by colonial others who, though barely visible, and confined to the margins of the discourse, enabled “those feelings, attitudes, and references” that located the domestic space at the center of an ever expanding global culture.157 But if empire produced functio
nal differences, how can a discourse of alterity now be deployed to deconstruct the hegemony of the imperial account and thus disperse its authority? And if slavery produced the first hybrid cultures in the modern period, how can this hybridity, one produced through interdiction and violence, now be celebrated as a condition of postcolonial agency? And if the effect of colonial power was the production of hybridization, as Homi Bhabha has claimed, how can this same colonial hybridity have the capacity to unsettle “the demand that figures at the center of the originary myth of colonial power”?158 And how do we avoid the trap of recuperating others merely as what Srinivas Aravamudan describes “as subordinates in some larger nationalist metanarrative” in which Britain remains central?159
On the Question of Blackness
The final critical problem, one that signals my major point of departure from revisionist histories of the modern period, concerns the complex racial markers of difference, the blackness that marked the slave as a slave because of his or her color. How does one write about the other as part of the technology of metropolitan identity and still underscore the fact that people conceived as others functioned as analogical figures of difference because they were considered to be part of the abnormal and pathological? How does one tell stories about an order of blackness that was essential to the maintenance of a modern European identity yet was considered so unruly that it needed to be controlled, displaced, or repressed if the modern self was to come to its own as a self-reflection subject of reason, of morality, and of taste? Clearly, the question of race in general and the problem of blackness in particular have to remain an intellectual site for continuing debates and controversies in the rethinking of modern identity. But in order to have a better understanding of the place and role of racialized bodies in making of the culture of taste, scholars should not lose sight of some difficult yet foundational questions: Was modernity itself a racialized category? Could modern slavery have existed outside a racialized economy?
Slavery and the Culture of Taste Page 7