The second painting, The Old Plantation, represents a slave dance in South Carolina at the end of the eighteenth century and is considered one of the earliest representations of Yoruba culture in North America. It, too, represents a scene in which the performance of an African dance has become an alibi for the gathering of community. But while many discussions of this picture have revolved around the sources and meaning of its African-derived objects, something important had changed in this rehearsal of Africanness.120 Here, the landscape and setting is not wholly autonomous; on the contrary, the dance takes place against the background of the plantation, represented by the fields and the slave cabins. We are no longer in the landscape of an imagined Africa with thatched huts, altar flags, nsunsa dances, and, by implication, cultural distinctiveness; rather, the slave cottages in the painting are similar to many others in the antebellum South. So if Van Valkenburg's picture represents a culture trying to replicate its old world in a new setting, The Old Plantation is a visual record of an emerging Creole culture.121 One painting captures a community, the Djuka of Suriname, rehearsing the African cultures they will later make the basis of their maroonage from Dutch control; the other represents another community in the American South performing a hybrid dance as a signal of their own peculiar relationship to the plantation.
How do we explain these transformations? Perhaps we can account for the distinctive styles of these two paintings in terms of time. The community observed and represented by Van Valkenburg in 1707 could remember Africa in a phenomenological sense and replay its rituals from memory. In contrast, for slaves in the low country of South Carolina (the subjects of The Old Plantation) at the end of the same century, Africa could not be retrieved from memory; it could only be imagined as a set of fragments that, significantly, needed to be patched together to have meaning. Is the dance represented in the picture a Mende Shegura, a West Indian Hipsaw, or a Yoruba Juba? Are the musical instruments Yoruba or Hausa? Are the headdresses African or American? Attempts to read The Old Plantation as the performance of an African dance, whether Yoruba or Mende, are bound to be incomplete, because the subject of the painting, and the culture it claims to represent, is cultural hybridity itself.
I want to conclude this chapter, however, by arguing that the two paintings represent diverse responses to the trauma of enslavement and the work of reconstructing community in its aftermath; thus they mark the first step in developing a response to the acts of dearting and de-aesthetization associated with enslavement. In Van Valkenburg's painting, Africa and its Africanisms are recalled through memory and elevated to high symbolism. In symbolism, as Walter Benjamin noted, destruction “is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption.”122
Although we cannot tell whether Van Valkenburg was accurately representing what he saw in front of him as he traveled in the Dombi plantation, or whether he was projecting his own vision on his subjects, evidence seems to suggest that the community he was observing in Suriname was engaged in an elaborate reconstruction of Africa through symbol and ritual.123 Here and elsewhere, remembering Africa was an important part of the slaves' moral orientation. But the work of memory is often fickle, and it was hard for Africans in enslavement to sustain the task of remembrance over time; it is in this context that works such as The Old Plantation, which seem to proffer impoverished and messy versions of Africa, become important. As I argue in the next chapter, this messier, sometimes truncated, often phantasmal, and always performed African imaginary, one at odds with the culture of taste itself, would provide the allegories through which the slave confronted the ugly face of history.
The Ontology of Play:
Mimicry and the Counterculture of Taste
Sometime between 1730 and 1745, an African drum was collected in Virginia by a certain Reverend Clarke on behalf of Sir Hans Sloane, distinguished English naturalist and founder of the British Museum (fig. 6.1). The drum, now at the British Museum, is a remarkable piece of work, one whose meaning is suspended somewhere between the aura of art and ritual. Constructed in the Akan style, and made of wood (Cordia and Baphia) native to Africa, deerskin, and vegetable fiber, it is considered to be one of the earliest known surviving examples of African objects in North America.1 If the drum was made in Africa, as the physical evidence suggests, then it would appear to counter the argument that no art, no history, no memories survived the middle passage of enslavement. But the drum also raises an issue that is more complicated than the idiom of cultural survival might suggest: who brought it to Virginia, and what was its use or value?
It is highly unlikely that slaves themselves loaded the object on board the slave ship as a mnemonic of the world they had left behind, for, as mentioned earlier, the first and most decisive step in the process of enslavement was stripping the body of all its accoutrements and returning it to a state of cultural nakedness. More likely, the drum was brought to the Americas by the captain of a slave ship or one of the sailors on board. If this is the case, it is hard to tell what worth the object had in the owner's mind: Did it attract in itself, as a work of art, one valuable enough to be dissociated from the people who had constructed it, who were now considered nonsubjects? Or was the drum a mere curiosity piece, something to be added to the ever-expanding cabinet of curios? And what would slaves in Virginia, confronting this object and perhaps trying to replicate it, consider its use value to be—a figure of memory, its loss, or both?
6.1 Akan-style drum, African, eighteenth century AD, from Virginia.
The best way of responding to these questions is to see this African drum, very much like the paintings of two African dances discussed at the end of the previous chapter, as what Walter Benjamin would refer to as the allegory of ruins. For like other remnants of African culture in the Americas, the drum was a mere fragment of a lost culture, a figure that had survived the human equivalent of what Benjamin calls “the most elemental forces of destruction, lightning and earthquakes.”2 Within the context of slavery, what had survived destruction could not be recuperated as a figure of beauty nor as an impeccable showpiece of a lost antiquity; rather, it was just one of the many entangled pieces out of which a new Creole culture could be constructed. As an assemblage of fragments, a creolized culture could only emerge as part of what the Caribbean scholar Edouard Glissant has called a “Forced Poetics”—a mode of expression that occurs “whenever a drive for expression confronts something impossible to express.”3 The notion of a forced poetics does not, of course, imply that Creole cultures were enforced by the masters as part of the business of managing slaves; on the contrary, argues Glissant, a creolized culture was “the original creation by the uprooted African, who, faced with the limited linguistic implements imposed on him, chose to limit it further, to warp it, to untune it, in order to make it an idiom of his own.”4
Under this postulation, two elements are central to the emergence of a slave-driven aesthetic in the new world. First, for the subjects stripped of native cultures and ruptured from former systems of pleasure and sensuousness, the work of art was predicated on the undoing, warping, and unraveling, even inverting, of the imposed idiom. Second, within the plantation system, the project of pleasure and sensuousness was underwritten by an awareness of the continuous opposition between the idiom that was forced on the slaves and the language that they needed in order to express their selfhood outside the grammar of bondage discussed in the previous chapters. Conscious of the incommensurability of the enforced means of expression and their desires, slaves were forced to develop a counter-poetics. This counter-poetics was, in turn, informed both by its self-awareness of the alienation that had engendered it in the first place and by the slaves' desire to fashion a language that might express their personhood outside the authorized idiom, be it the law or the rule of taste. Aware that their new cultures could not be authorized by a native language, culture, or genealogy, slaves were compelled to turn their “familiar foreignness” into a work of art.5 But the tas
k of turning slavery into a speakable event, a representam, as it were, faced a double challenge: how to recognize the impossibility of belonging to a place yet claim one's presence in it; of how to strive and yearn for emplacement yet live in a world in which rights and ideals were constantly thwarted. This would create what W.E.B. Du Bois would later call “the peculiar ethical paradox” of African American life.6
Within the reigning ideologies of culture, slaves were systematically excluded from the realm of beauty and taste; their relationship to objects that would be considered beautiful was hence tenuous; and given the regimen of labor and control, their notions of pleasure were radically different from those of their masters. This does not mean that works of art could not be sources of pleasure in the context of enslavement; the problem was that where subjects were not free, or even allowed the capacity for self-reflection because they were considered to be property, the idea and practice of pleasure would require a different form and meaning. In fact, my contention in this chapter is that slaves would come to value works of art as ruins and fragments—broken bowls, jars and quilts, and half-remembered African dances—because only the fragmentary and incomplete had the capacity to denote the doubleness that was the mark of African identities in the new world, the sign of a presence and absence both in time and space.
Slaves were located in spaces they did not desire, and they often yearned for a lost world, yet it was the presentness of the plantation system that commanded daily attention. In the circumstances, the works of culture that emerged in slave cultures tended to be caught between the need to denote an Africa that existed only in the imagination or dim memories, and the regimen of the plantation and its powerful and often brutal demands—the persistence of American everydayness. This division or duality was to become the signature of new-world blackness, what W.E.B. Du Bois famously called “double-consciousness.”7 The peculiar sensation of doubleness, Du Bois noted, arose from the condition of living in “twoness,” of being “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two ideals in one dark body.”8
Ironically, it was through its incommensurability with the world it inhabited that the slaves' aesthetic could be connected to a channel of life that existed outside enslavement. For slaves, culture itself had to start as a ruin, a fragment that represented both connection and disconnection from Africa. Out of the ruins of Africanism, slaves could have a vision of their location and dislocation in both the new and old worlds. Bodies could be broken, memories could be deracinated, but thoughts, or fragments of thoughts, could be used to summon new identities or to ward off the pains of living under the whip. Against the bitter dregs of slavery, the enslaved would turn to sound (the shout) as the building block of what was denied them: selfhood, community, and family.
One of the earlier memories of Frederick Douglass, who was often averse to slave revelry, was that of slaves marching to the great house for their monthly allowance, their “wild songs” reverberating in the dense woods “revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness.”9 Douglass went on to observe how these songs used sound—not words—to sustain what we now call a hermeneutics of suspicion by contrasting the surface reality of the plantation with the deep wounds in the souls of the slaves.10 For the slaves, a questioning of the order of the plantation was achieved through what amounted to a chiasmus of passion: “They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone.”11 Douglass noted how these sorrow songs led him to understand what enslavement meant by affect; through the “affliction” of feelings that they triggered, these songs to spoke to him and others. But these feelings also secured a measure of reflection, providing the “first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery.”12 And at the end of The Souls of Black Folks, trying to ward off the despair that had overcome Alexander Crummell, his hero, Du Bois would turn to the spirituals, the sorrow songs, as “the articulate message of the slave to the world,” expressions of what had eluded rationality and a disorganized sociology; they were the conduit to the unspoken, telling “of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.”13 However, Du Bois wanted more than mere emotions from these songs: he needed them to stand in for a past, an Africanism outside the instrumentality of racial bondage. So he turned to the fragment of an African song sung by his great-grandmother, Violet, and posited it as the string of lineage. The song would be passed from generation to generation, its words unknown, but the meaning of its music intuitively comprehended.14
This turn to sound as a mode of meaning raises intriguing questions: Could negative or affective understanding provide the scaffold for community building? And if so, how could a tenuous Africanism be turned into the basis of a new set of structures and identities? Among the Akan, the drum that opened my discussion was deeply connected to profound rituals and meanings, tied up with the work of imagining and building communities, and to the individual's deep sense of belonging. Drums, like other regal works of art, were part of a whole complexity of ideas and ideals, the elaboration of cosmologies and genealogies, of associative relationships rather than structures of alienation. In the Americas, however, this same drum, like Violet's song, was a reminder of what had been or what could have been; it was condemned to exist at once as an insignia of identity and alienation, part of a redemptive hermeneutics and also a mark of the crisis of meaning for the black as a modern subject.15 How, then, could one be a self in a place of enforced nonbeing, a state where all the integers of selfhood, including time and space, were owned by another? How could the self be a self in a place of radical alienation? And could a site of pleasure be hallowed in the midst of pain and suffering? These questions lie at the heart of the aesthetic that sought to imagine the unspeakable experience of slavery. And in order to understand what it meant to construct a sensorium in the space of death, we need to reflect on how slaves sought to undo the idiom of taste described in the beginning of this book and how, in this undoing, they developed alternative modes of expressiveness.
At the end of the last chapter I argued that by the end of the eighteenth century, African slaves in the Americas had started to construct a new kind of aesthetic in response to their condition of enslavement. They had established modes of ritual and forms of performance that would reorient them in the new world and locate them in a both moral and public space, and modes of pleasure that would counter their representation as mere chattel. I argued that when slaves in the Dombi plantation in Suriname or in the South Carolina rice country rehearsed elaborate Kongo dances or danced the Juba, they were staking a moral claim to the public sphere. But I left two questions unaddressed: Why was the staking of these claims important to modern identity? And why did enslavement demand, among other things, an aesthetic response?
These are difficult questions to answer, because as noted earlier, the act of enslavement was predicated on the exclusion of the slave from the moral and aesthetic realm. Indeed, all the categories used by Europeans to exclude slaves from modern civic culture—from the devaluation of their labor, the imprisonment of their bodies in a language of violence and ugliness, and the condemnation of their culture to ritual uncleanliness—had powerful moral connotations. Even when technologies of exclusion were not explicitly moral, they had to be moralized for affect. In fact, the practice of associating blackness with dirt was to continue with uncanny persistence through Jim Crow and the right-wing reaction against the civil rights movement in the 1950s. Lynching, for example, was articulated as a form of white defense against black licentiousness directed against the cleanliness of white women.16 Within the culture of modernity, of course, the privileging of moral categories is not unusual. As Charles Taylor has shown, there was an essential link “between identity and a kind of moral orientation”: “To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth doing
and what not, what has meaning and importance for you and what is trivial and secondary.”17 But this assertion assumes a set of meanings and values predicated on a free, self-reflective subject. How do questions of moral orientation play out in the world of the dominated and unfree? How did slaves come to emplace themselves in the places of exile?
One might argue that the enslaved had no say in moral matters because bondage precluded any form of control over would-be spaces of identity. Yet what was striking about spatial configurations in slave communities, especially in the Caribbean and the antebellum South, was the slaves' determination and capacity to create real and imaginary spaces of placement, to presuppose “a space-analogue within which one finds one's way.”18 One remarkable aspect of slave life was the capacity of the enslaved to create dynamic neighborhoods that “encompassed the bonds of kinship, the practice of Christianity, the geography of sociability, the field of labor and discipline, the grounds of solidarity, the terrain of struggle.”19 As Sylvia Wynter has argued in a classic essay on folk art in Jamaica, slaves, alienated from Africa in “space, time or degree,” and faced equally with “the more total alienation of the New World,” developed a cultural response that transformed them into “the indigenous” inhabitants of their new land: they indigenized the new world by humanizing the landscape through what amounts to an aesthetic response—“peopling it with gods and spirits, with demons and duppies, with all the panoply of man's imagination.”20
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