Unspeakable Events:
Slavery and White Self-Fashioning
The year 1763 was a traumatic one for Olaudah Equiano (fig. 3.1), future abolitionist and Anglo-African man of letters. After spending four ostensibly blissful years in England and the high seas living out a meaningful life as a sailor, a profession that often masked his condition of enslavement, Equiano suddenly found himself back in the belly of the beast that was slavery. Without warning or explanation, his master, Michael Henry Pascal, decided to sell Equiano to a Captain James Doran, who planned to take the African back to the West Indies and the accursed life of plantation slavery. This was almost ten years before Lord Mansfield's decision barring the return of James Somersett into bondage and before English jurisprudence settled the vexed question of whether the slave was property or person. Despite all of his protestations against the evils of slavery and the invocations of the law, Equiano had no recourse. He was quickly plunged into what he described as a new form of bondage and bundled onto a ship.
On February 13th, 1763, Equiano found himself on the island of Montserrat in a recursive gesture that appeared to him to be nothing less than the rehearsal of the primal scene of enslavement he first described in the opening two chapters of The Interesting Narrative:
At the sight of this land of bondage, a fresh horror ran through all my frame, and chilled me to the heart. My former slavery now rose in dreadful review to my mind, and displayed nothing but misery, stripes, and chains; and, in the first paroxysm of my grief, I called upon God's thunder, and his avenging power, to direct the stroke of death to me, rather than permit me to become a slave, and to be sold from lord to lord.
In this state of my mind our ship came to an anchor, and soon after discharged her cargo. I now knew what it was to work hard; I was made to help to unload and load the ship. And, to comfort me in my distress in that time, two of the sailors robbed me of all my money, and ran away from the ship. I had been so long used to an European climate that at first I felt the scorching West India sun very painful, while the dashing surf would toss the boat and the people in it frequently above high-water mark. Sometimes our limbs were broken with this, or even attended with instant death, and I was day by day mangled and torn.1
3.1 Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African. From Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (London, 1789).
For the enslaved African, what had initially appeared to be the narrative of providence and progress, one sustained by the illusion of the life of a global citizen on the open seas, had now become the nightmare of regressive time. Equiano found himself moving from island to island in the West Indies, “daily exposed to new hardships and impositions,” and plunged into the midst of the violence and cruelty that governed the lives of the enslaved; he was far from the cosmopolitan centers of Europe in which he had been gallivanting only a few months before.2 Cosmopolitanism and its ideals of freedom now seemed a distant dream. Savannah, Georgia, rather than London or Paris, seemed to be the natural destiny of the black.3
But in 1763 Paris was very much on the mind of David Hume, the Scottish philosopher and man of letters. Hume was considered by many to be the ideal cosmopolitan subject of his age, a man of learning, culture, and taste. In that year, Hume arrived in Paris as acting secretary to the British embassy; for the next three years he captured the attention and the imagination of the Parisian elite not so much for his consular activities, but for his effect on the emerging cosmopolitanism of the age. In fact, Hume's reputation as the representative man of the age of Enlightenment, a subject wedded to the ideals of reason and taste, had preceded him to France. Welcoming Hume in Paris in 1763, Frederick Grimm, the French writer, compared his guest to Denis Diderot: “My dear David, you belong to all the nations of the earth and you never ask a man a place of his birth. I flatter myself that I am like you, a citizen of the great city of the world.”4 In uttering these words, Grimm was probably thinking about Hume's famous description of the cosmopolitan as “a creature” whose thoughts were not limited by what he called “narrow bonds, either of place or time” and a person able to carry researches “into the most distant regions of this globe, and beyond this globe, to the planets and heavenly bodies.”5 And to be visiting Paris in the middle of the eighteenth century was to be in the one place in the world where the ideals of culture and good taste were shepherding modernity. In the salons of the city, such as the one run by Mme Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin, the best minds of the age would meet for enlightened conversation. Cosmopolitanism was the gold standard of good taste, and the salon, the favored site of social interaction, was as far removed from the slave port and markets of Savannah, Georgia, as one could imagine.
The line dividing cosmopolitan culture and the moral geography of slavery was not, however, as wide as the images of the salon and the slave port invoked here might suggest. As I argued in earlier chapters, it was precisely the proximity of these two spheres of social existence—a cosmopolitan culture and the world of bondage—that necessitated their conceptual separation. For if the goal of the project of taste was to quarantine the modern European subject from contaminating forces associated with the political economy of slavery and commerce in general, the desire for cultural purity was continuously haunted by what it excluded or repressed. Here, what Paul Ricoeur has called a “vocabulary of the pure and impure” would come to depend on the ambiguity of the idea of culture itself; aspirations to cultural status would oscillate between the desire for the refined subject or object to exist for itself and the ugly fact that the idea of cleanliness was often driven by a mechanism of exclusion.6
Ideals of taste would be adumbrated though the repression of the “symbolic stain” that was slavery.7 As a consequence, many conceptual attempts to establish the moral boundaries separating the high from the low were under constant pressure from the real or imagined presence of the enslaved. Theorists and practitioners of taste went to great lengths to block the figure of the slave and the drudgery of slavery from entering into the domain of taste, and the claims and counterclaims they made in regard to sense and sensibility would lead to the policing of the invisible line dividing Equiano, aspiring for cultural mastery, and Hume, determined to quarantine cosmopolitan Europe from black dirt.8 My concern in this chapter, then, is the powerful, visible, and material presence of slavery in the symbolic drawing rooms of modern Britain and the haunting of established ideas of high culture, consumption, and taste by the world of African bondage: why is it that the early generation of African writers in Europe and the Americas, almost without exemption former slaves, came to trouble the men of high culture, often cloistered in universities, coffeehouses, and salons, which seemed so far removed from what Saidiya Hartman has aptly defined as the violent “scene of subjection”?9
2
On the surface, Hume's intellectual concerns, the power of which in shaping all facets of modern identity from morals to the law is undisputed, would appear to be remote from such lowly scenes as the slave market and the plantation. As one of the most distinguished cosmopolitan subjects of his generation and a leading figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, Hume was engaged in a universal project whose goal was to chaperone the culture of taste along rational lines and to endow it with a solid philosophical foundation or “reflected utility.”10 In 1757, six years before his arrival in Paris, Hume had published “Of the Standard of Taste,” a seminal essay on the nature of aesthetic judgment, where he set out to establish “a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled” and to establish a standard of taste for people “of good sense and delicate taste.”11 Like many discussions of taste in the period, Hume's project was surrounded by ambiguity and circularity; but it was also driven by the desire for a resolution to what Preben Mortensen has isolated as one of the central problems of the age: “how do we, in a world where there is no longer a central authority, create new forms of agreement” about taste and social relationships?12 An overriding goal of Hume's
project was to aggregate taste and its subjects; he sought to go beyond the idea that all judgments of taste were equal and to identify subjects who were bestowed with a refined sensibility. In particular, Hume wanted to show that there was a standard of taste that was understood and shared by people of good sense and, equally, that although the principles of taste were universal, only a few were qualified “to give judgment on any work of art, or establish their own sentiment as the standard of beauty.”13 True men of taste were rare, Hume reminded his readers, but they were “easily distinguished in society, by the soundness of their understanding and the superiority of their faculties above the rest of mankind.”14
Hume recognized that attempts to fix a standard of taste, and thus “reconcile the discordant apprehensions of men,” were subject to some variants, notably individual temperament and differing manners, but he was confident that in spite of subjective and temporal differences, the general principles of taste were, in his words, “uniform in human nature.”15 Although he was wedded to an aristocracy of taste, Hume considered prejudice inimical to aesthetic judgment. A judgment of taste, he insisted, depended on the subject's ability to “preserve his mind free from all prejudice, and allow nothing to enter into his consideration, but the very object which is submitted to his examination.”16 His belief that prejudice was “destructive of sound judgment, and perverts all operations of the intellectual faculties” was unequivocal; in fact, he deemed “the principles of taste” to be universal “and nearly, if not entirely, the same in all men.”17 But what was included in this category of “all men” or even the universal principle of taste? Could the same general principles of taste apply to colonial subjects, most notably black slaves in the Atlantic world, who had by now become the backbone of the commerce of empire and the most visible insignias of racial difference? Where did the black figures who, in a fascinating engraving by George Thompson (after a painting by Sir James Doyle [fig. 3.2]), hovered around the powerful men of culture fit into the discourse and practice of taste?
3.2 D. George Thompson, A Literary Party at Sir Joshua Reynolds's. 1851. Stipple and line engraving. Published by Owen Bailey, after James William Edmund Doyle.
Such questions were probably not troubling Hume when he turned to the question of taste in 1757, because he had already answered them in a now infamous footnote to the second edition of an essay called “Of National Characters” published in 1742. In this essay, which was to be cited and recited by his contemporaries, Hume declared that “negroes…and other species of men” were “naturally inferior to the whites.”18 That Hume could insist on the inferiority of “negroes…and other species of men” should not, of course, surprise us given the discourses of denigration that surrounded the figure of the African slave especially in the middle of the eighteenth century. What is surprising is that an intellectual of Hume's caliber and humanistic interests, one whose goal was to establish universal moral and aesthetic judgments, and one who considered prejudice injurious to this endeavor, seemed untroubled by his own sense of prejudice. What was even more startling about this footnote was how Hume proceeded to clarify the terms by which black subjects were excluded from the universe of taste and, more particularly, what was supposed to be its universality.
It is notable that Hume had not taken the easy way out of the apparent contradiction between the universal principle of taste and the inferiority of the black. On the contrary, he had studiously avoided characterizing the “Negro” as nonhuman; he did not categorically state that blacks were naturally inferior—he was expressing a mere suspicion. But even with this tentativeness, Hume seemed too willing to fall back on the grammar of racial difference provided by natural history, which he used to explain black cultural lack; ascribing the characters of human beings to geography—at least “the air and the climate”—not to a simple raciology. When it came to matters of culture and civilization, however, Hume was not so tentative; he had no doubt that the white race was superior in the area of aesthetic genius and cultural achievement: “There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation.” Hume contended that among the “the most rude and barbarous of the whites, such as the ancient GERMANS, the present TARTARS,” was to be found “something eminent about them in their valour, form of government, or some other particular,” while there were “no ingenious manufactures” and “no arts, no sciences” among nonwhites. His claim was that such “uniform and constant differences” could not happen in so many countries in all ages unless nature had made what he called “an original distinction” between “these breeds of men.”19
Hume clinched his argument by turning specifically to blacks. There were black slaves dispersed all over Europe “of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity, tho' low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession.” For Hume, the most obvious sign of black inferiority was aesthetic lack and a general incapacity in the realm of taste. Casting around for evidence of black aesthetic lack, Hume would inevitably turn to the colonies: “In JAMAICA, indeed, they talk of one negro as a man of pans and learning; but it is likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly,” Hume concluded his footnote.20 The “data” provided here was taken up by major philosophers and planter historians alike. The world of the enslavement and the slave, considered far removed from the drawing rooms of the cultured, would become a philosophical point of reference, in absentia, for the rules that governed high culture.21 In fact, Hume's commentary on the black's lack of inventive genius would became the “authoritative” source for Immanuel Kant's verdict on black cultural and aesthetic inferiority:
The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling. Mr. Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and through superior gifts earn respect in the world.22
Here, again, we have a vivid example of how the culture of taste and its informing concerns was being calibrated against black aesthetic lack, and how artistic criteria and sensibility, or their absence in the other, had now become one of the visible measures of difference.23
Of course, neither Hume nor Kant was particularly interested in the lives of black slaves or their place in the sophisticated schemes of freedom that they were elaborating. Yet the black could not be left out of it altogether; blackness was, after all, part of the “fabricated presence” through which ideals such as beauty and genius could be imagined.24 In this particular case, the fabrication was Francis Williams (fig. 3.3), a free Jamaican black who had been sent to Cambridge under the sponsorship of the Duke of Montagu as part of an experiment to determine whether blacks, “if properly educated,” were capable of “the same improvements as whites.”25 At Cambridge, and later as a schoolmaster in Jamaica, Williams had written poetry in Latin and cultivated the life of a gentleman.
Williams's audacious decision to produce poetry had attracted the attention of both pro-slavery and antislavery interests in England. Opponents of slavery, seeking to salvage the humanity of the blacks through the aesthetic, presented Williams as evidence that black subjects had the capacity to produce art, a precondition for a modern identity.26 For exponents of slavery, however, Williams's Cambridge education and his production of verse in Latin threatened their central claim that the black subject was incapable of artistic genius. They hence set out to prove that the poetry Williams had produced was not original, but a poor imitation of works he had encountered in the course of his education. Transforming Hume's footnote into a memorable chapter in the History of Jamaica, for example, Edward Long
translated Williams's poetry from Latin in order to expose its derivativeness and, though not stated directly, its mediocrity. To consider the merits of Williams's poetry impartially, Long asserted, “[W]e must endeavor to forget, in the first place, that the writer was a Negroe; for if we regard it as an extraordinary production, merely because it came from a Negroe, we admit at once that inequality of genius which has been supposed, and admire it only as a rare phenomenon.”27
How, then, was this poetry to be judged? Long had some critical views on the matter: “We are to estimate it as having flowed from the polished pen of one, who received an academic education, under every advantage that able preceptors, and munificent patrons, could furnish; we must likewise believe it to be, what it actually was, a piece highly laboured; designed, modeled, and perfected, to the utmost stretch of his invention, imagination, and skill.”28 As far as Long was concerned, Williams's genius was educated, not natural, and a cultivated genius was not a mark of a rational and moral self but the manifestation of the mimicry that Hume had noted in his footnote. Long was not in doubt that the question of artistic production was at the heart of the argument on racial difference and that whichever side prevailed in this dispute would perhaps win the debate on some of the most important questions of the time, including the nature of human character and the immanency of slavery. In this context, it could be argued that the question of Williams's intellect and genius would come to function as the body on which many of the philosophical and cultural issues that dominated the long eighteenth century have been debated; he would come to function either as the symptom of black achievement or of its failure in areas that were considered essential to subjectivity, civility, and taste.29
3.3 Anonymous. Portrait of Francis Williams. Circa 1745. Oil on canvas.
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