Slavery and the Culture of Taste

by Gikandi, Simon;

  But the instruments of torture and the modes of punishment that Foucault assumed had been exorcised from the European penal system continued to thrive in many plantation societies in the Americas, a fact that prompted Marcus Wood to raise a provocative question: why would the spectacle of physical punishment be displaced from the European scene and yet thrive in the American and Caribbean colonies?107 Wood's response to this question is to make a distinction between the question of power, a key term in Foucault's lexicon, and the economy of terror, which, as we have already seen, defined the relation between masters and slaves: “The slave codes, and the operation of large plantations, combined logic and efficiency with barbaric violence, and a display of power which was focused upon the public torture of the body of the slave.”108

  This legalistic and instrumental explanation of the persistence of physical torture in slave societies is convincing, but it doesn't explain the necessity of the spectacle and the exhibitionary order, the scopic regime of enslavement that I discussed in the introductory chapter. The issue here is not simply that the spectacle of the tortured body continued to have an authority in the Americas that it had lost in Europe; rather, the fact remains that a priori claims made for the body in a slave context were radically different from those in “free” society. At precisely the moment in European society that the destruction of the body came to be seen as a source of moral embarrassment, torture and mutilation were considered essential for the maintenance of symbolic domination in slave society.

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  To understand the role of punishment as perversely desirable, it is important to rehearse the spectacle of punishment and its inscription in the European text and to turn, like others have done before, to the works of John Gabriel Stedman, whose Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam and the illustrations accompanying it provide an unrivaled witness to the use of violence as a part of an exhibitionary order.109

  Early during his expedition in Suriname, Stedman was struck by the role played by torture in the management of rebellious slaves: “In 1730, a most shocking and barbarous execution of eleven of the unhappy negro captives was resolved upon, in the expectation that it might terrify their companions and induce them to submit. One man was hanged alive upon a gibbet by an iron hook stuck through his ribs; two others were chained to stakes and burnt to death by a slow fire. Six women were broken alive upon the rack, and two girls were decapitated. Such was their resolution under these tortures, that they endured them without even uttering a sigh.”110 Writing from a generally pro-abolitionist position after his tour of duty in Suriname, Stedman was fascinated by scenes of barbarity because of the powerful impression they had left on him—”the gloom which the infernal furnace had left upon my mind,” as he put it.111 William Blake's illustrations for Stedman's book were to become powerful visual testimonies to the economy of terror at the end of the long eighteenth century (figs. 4.12 and 4.13).

  4.12 William Blake, The Execution of Breaking on the Rack. 1793. Engraving, From John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam.

  4.13 William Blake, A Negro hung alive by the Ribs to a Gallows. Engraving. From John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam.

  Couldn't slaves be punished and their bodies destroyed without making a public spectacle of their punishment and death? While punishment in modern Europe was intended to deprive the body of liberty, the property of subjectivity, and the entitlement to life, the black slave had no rights to such rights or any claim to a unique identity. Quite often, torture was justified by the absence of any reference to the slave's right to liberty or human property; it was intended to reinforce the existence of the slave as chattel or to provide a public example of the power of the masters to control their property. Indeed, it is precisely because the slave was chattel—property without rights or entitlement to life—that it could be subjected to the most extremes forms of torture. Violence is what ensured that the slave's body could function as a useful force as what Foucault calls “a productive body and a subjected body.”112

  Moreover, what was crucial about the scenes witnessed by Stedman and graphically represented by his illustrators was that the power of these images depended on spectatorship and effect. In fact, spectatorship and effect would operate on two levels or planes. In the first instance, there was the record of the act of torture as it had been observed, represented here by Stedman's prose. In the second instance, the observed effect was re-represented, for tactical reasons, to affect readers who were far removed from the event in order to achieve a particular political goal, in this case abolitionism. Still, the question that needs to be addressed is why white observers such as Edwards and Stedman were attracted to these scenes of torture, why they presented them in such great detail, and why they made them central to their narratives irrespective of political positions.

  Although Stedman's graphic representations of scenes of torture and execution were intended to force his readers to react against slavery, he also had an uncanny ability to connect scenes of barbarity with those of pleasure. He knew, for example, that his expedition was in Suriname to protect the sources of the coffee that had become a major source of pleasure in European high culture. Stedman easily recognized the connection between coffee, a valued stimulant, and the violence of slavery. During a visit to a coffee estate in Suriname, he witnessed what he described as “the unpardonable contempt with which the negro slaves are treated in this colony”:

  I was an eye witness of His son, a boy not more than ten years old, when sitting at table, gave a slap in the face to a grey-headed black woman, who by accident touched his powdered hair as she was serving in a dish of kerry. I could not help blaming his father for overlooking the action, but he told me, with a smile, that the child should no longer offend me, as he was next day to sail for Holland for education. To this I answered that I thought it almost too late. At the same moment a sailor passing by, broke the head of a negro with a bludgeon, for not having saluted him with his hat. Such is the state of slavery, at least in this Dutch settlement!113

  Representations of scenes of barbarity by romantic writers, most notably William Blake in his illustrations for Stedman's book, tended to invoke a poetics of suffering in which, to use Hugh Honor's words, the tortured black was endowed with “the fortitude of Christian martyrs and thereby elevating them to a level of heroic suffering from which they were otherwise barred.”114

  A closer look at the engravings of the torture of slave women, which were often suffused with Christian overtones, may lead one to the conclusion that the female subject had been selected as the conduit through which violence could be sensualized or even eroticized. Indeed, in one of the most famous engravings of a mulatto woman being flogged (fig. 4.14), the subject under torture bears a resemblance to Joanna, Stedman's eroticized mistress and common-law wife. In this case, as in others, the line that would come to divide abjection from sexual desire was not clearly demarcated, and it is not clear whether, in watching these pictures, the spectator was supposed to share the pain of the tortured body or to admire its fortitude and suffering.115

  4.14 William Blake, Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave. 1793. Engraving. From John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam.

  Thus, while Stedman might have designed his prose to ascertain the quotidianness of torture in the culture of slavery, he often ended up turning the scene of suffering itself into a unique, heroic, and sexualized event. For example, Stedman reports witnessing an African who “lost his life under the most excruciating torments, which he supported without heaving a sigh or making a complaint.”116 And in one of the most gruesome scenes in his narrative, he repeated a story told to him by “a decent looking man,” who talked with relish about the quartering of a slave and the entertainment provided by the stoic victim in his last moments:

  After fo
ur strong horses had been fastened to his legs and arms, and iron sprigs had been driven home underneath every one of his nails on hands and feet, he first asked a dram, and then bid them pull away, without a groan. But what afforded us the greatest entertainment, were the fellow's jokes, by desiring the executioner to drink before him, in case there should chance to be poison in the glass, and bidding him take care of his horses, lest any of them should happen to strike backwards. As for old men being broken upon the rack, and young women roasted alive chained to stakes, there can be nothing more common in this colony.117

  For Stedman, then, the renarrativization and apparent eroticization of such scenes of suffering was not merely intended to draw a distinction between the heroic slave and the callous master but to endow them with the power of abjection and sentimentality. This explains the subtle contrast he made between the “moral” of the stories told by the “decent young man” and his own reaction to this story: “I was petrified at the inhuman detail, and breaking away with execrations from this diabolical scene of laceration, made the best of my way home to my own lodgings.”118

  Undoubtedly, the representation of the slave as a stoic figure in suffering and death presented an image of Christian charity that enervated the case for the humanity of the African as a subject worthy of pity. The problem with these representations, however, was that they could easily mirror another discourse of violence that was emerging at about the same time and was to acquire currency after the abolition of the slave trade: the discourse in which the proponents of slavery would often rewrite the history of the African slave—in Africa and before enslavement—to make the claim that the blacks had never had any rights to liberty, that pain and suffering, and an unmitigated inhumanity, were their natural state.119 While abolitionists displayed the violence of slavery to move public passions against enslavement, proponents of slavery called attention to the wantonness of African life to make the case that violence was inherent in the condition of the black, who was better off under the modern regimen of plantation life than the fetishistic economies of their homeland.

  In both cases, iconography played a central role in the making of the American world picture and the place of the black in it. But what I have sought to bring together in this chapter is the play of two traditions of representation often separated in time and space, one claiming distance from the harsh materiality of slavery through invocation of taste, the other enmeshed in the unholy business of managing bodies that had been decreed socially dead. In the next two chapters I will consider how the slaves themselves responded to this strange conjuncture of violence and taste.

  “Popping Sorrow”:

  Loss and the Transformation of Servitude

  If one were looking for an intimate connection between slavery and the culture of taste, there would be no better place to go than the series of paintings and engravings done by the Italian artist Agostino Brunias under the commission of Sir William Young, the governor of Dominica and commissioner of St. Vincent in the Windward Islands (figs. 5.1 and 5.2). On the surface, Brunias's images were colorful evocations of tropical landscapes, now familiar touristic pictures of a West Indian paradise where happy blacks and enchanting mulattoes encountered one another in markets, streets, and dance arenas against the picturesque background of the blue Caribbean sea. Here was the West Indies of the colonial imagination: ladies in colorful fabrics and parasols, market women in higgler headgear, and mulattoes mimicking the dance steps of European courts with blacks observing on the periphery. In this imaginary colonial paradise of markets, festivals, and promenades, the mulatto woman stood out as the quintessential figure of an attractive difference.1

  These pictures do not, or course, depart from the planter image of the West Indies as a garden or a picturesque landscape “not much unlike to, nor less romantic than, the most wild and beautiful situations of the Frescati, Tivoli, and Albano.”2 But as Kay Dian Kriz has shown in her careful survey and study of Brunias's artwork, these paintings and engravings were summoned to do colonial work in two unexpected ways. First, they were intended to reproduce the West Indian islands, all slave colonies at the time, as intimate and desirable places of settlement. Second, they were expected to present the islands as spaces of cultivation and refinement.3 In fact, it could be argued that one of the major goals of these images, and the whole process of reproducing the slave islands as pictures for European consumption, was driven by one overriding desire: to obviate the violent presence of slavery through the calculated production of happiness. If the West Indies was to attract enough English settlers to counter French designs, it had to disavow its real identity as a place where social relationships were conducted through the brutal regimen of enforced labor or the modes of excess associated with the white Creoles. Through images of happy slaves, colonization would be reimagined as what Sir William Young called a “jovial party.”4 In these circumstances, the reproduction of the West Indies as a desirable aesthetic object was self-consciously mediated through the culture of taste and represented through its dominant idiom. Thus the mulatto women in these paintings would be imagined, very much like the ladies of taste discussed in chapter 2, as people located in a public space “actively disengaged from commercial transactions”; like “figures in English conversation pieces,” the so-called mulatress would be “involved in conversation or polite recreations, such as dancing,” almost oblivious to the marketplace as a site of exchange.5

  5.1 Agostino Brunias, The Linen Market at St. Domingo. Engraved print of painting by Agostino Brunias, published by John P. Thompson (London), October 6, 1804.

  5.2 Agostino Brunias, A Negro Festival Drawn from Nature on the Island of St. Vincent. Lithograph. From Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies.

  And yet, given Brunias's careful deployment of the vocabulary of taste, the mulatress could not convincingly be represented as a surrogate for the absent slave, as Kriz claims; on the contrary, the mixed-race woman functioned as the stand-in, a supplement, as it were, for the absent white woman.6 Far from pointing out the defining contradictions of slave society, a place where black bondage and white taste met in a contrapuntal relationship, the figure of the mulatress could be summoned to nudge readers and viewers of these scenes to see beyond their competing political and aesthetic ideologies. One could gaze on, or even consume, this figure of beauty without even noticing the unspeakable subject of slavery. In this sense, the mulatress could provide a new dimension to a discourse of black happiness that was being presented by supporters of the slave trade as an antidote to the abolitionist insistence on black pathos.

  This discourse—the reproduction of the slave as a happy subject in bondage—can be found in the works of Robert Norris, one of the last great advocates of the slave trade in Britain, a man who continued to be puzzled and irritated by the abolitionists' association of enslavement with suffering and unhappiness. Norris, who assumed that the passage of blacks from the West African coast to the plantations of the Americas had liberated them from barbarism and bondage at home, could not understand how the enslaved could be unhappy in the Americas. At the end of Memoirs of the Reign of Bossa Ahadeee, King of Dahomy—ostensibly an account of the kingdom of Dahomey at the height of the slave trade, but in reality a rearguard attempt to defend slavery against the onslaught of abolitionism—Norris carefully observed how in the plantations of the West Indies, African slaves had found a home and sanctuary against the excesses of black despotism in their own country. After years of work in the plantation, noted Norris, the African slave would find, in old age, not wretchedness or “chilling penury” but help and consolation in the hands of “his children, and his children's children, his friends, and former fellow-laborers; his countrymen, and fellow passengers.”7 To support his claim, Norris noted that there had scarcely been a case where an enslaved black in the West Indies had expressed the desire to return to his or her country; there had not been instances of freed slaves returning home. On the con
trary, “even newly imported Negroes, when threatened by the overseer, upon some fault or neglect of theirs, to be sent back again, are seriously alarmed at it.”8

  5.3 Princess Madia, Enslaved African from the Congo. June 2, 1860. Harper's Weekly.

  Slaves did not, of course, consider their condition to be one of freedom and happiness; instead, many enslaved Africans conceived and performed sorrow as the true representation of their state and drew on the reserves of their unhappiness and depression to find a language for expressing the integrity of the self against overwhelming conditions of oppression. This seems to have been the case with Madia, a Congolese woman aboard the slave ship Wildfire captured by the U.S. Navy off Key West, Florida, in 1860 (fig. 5.3). It is reported that because of the solemnity of her bearing, most notably the palm she always placed on her cheek, Madia was accorded the status of a princess.9 In the culture of slavery, the performance of sorrow often went hand in hand with the arduous task of recovering the self from psychic bondage and re-representing it in public space.

  And thus it is to Princess Madia, rather than the phantom figures of happiness imagined by Brunias, Norris, and the major planter historians, that we must turn in order to understand how slaves set out to cultivate a sensuous subjectivity outside the regimen of bondage and enforced labor. It is to the melancholy generated by slavery that we must seek not only discourses and performances of resistance but also what Joseph Roach has called “the vitality and sensuous presence of material forms.”10 Here, even the smallest physical gesture, such as the placement of the palm on the cheek, was to become the visible measure of a depressive affect, the pose of sorrow, loss, and mourning (see fig. 5.4).11 Melancholy constituted an important aesthetic reaction to the violence of enslavement, an alternative to the sensibility of high European culture discussed at the beginning of this book.