Slavery and the Culture of Taste

by Gikandi, Simon;

  88. Ibid., 216.

  89. Hume, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” 278.

  90. The essays collected in Bermingham and Brewer, Consumption of Culture, provide solid evidence of the interplay of affirmation and denial in the construction of the culture of taste.

  91. Caygill, Art of Judgement, 43.

  92. Brewer, “‘Most Polite Age’,” 353. For the ways in which gender could disturb the epistemological boundaries of the culture of taste, see L. Brown, Fables of Modernity and Ends of Empire; Castle, Female Thermometer and Masquerade and Civilization; and Nussbaum, Autobiographical Subject, Torrid Zones, and Limits of the Human.

  93. Wilson, introduction to New Imperial History. See also Wilson, Island Race; Armitage, Ideological Origins; and Colley, Britons.

  94. Nussbaum and Brown, New Eighteenth Century, 14. See also Nussbaum, Global Eighteenth Century; and Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans.

  95. See Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 70–71.

  96. Mortensen, Art in the Social Order, 116.

  97. Barrell, Dark Side of the Landscape, 5.

  98. Wood, Blind Memory, 7. For the relation between aesthetics and the culture of pain, see Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; and Scarry, Body in Pain.

  99. For William Blake, see Bindman et al., Mind-forg'd Manacles; for visual culture in the slave zones, see Quilley and Kriz, Economy of Colour; Kriz, Slavery, Sugar; and Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power.

  100. Walvin, England, Slaves, and Freedom. See also Walvin's earlier works: Black and White; Black Ivory; and Black Presence. The literature on blacks in Britain is extensive, but I have found the following useful for this chapter: Gerzina, Black England and Black London; Fryer, Staying Power; Shyllon, Black Britannia and Black Slaves in Britain; P. Edwards and Walvin, Black Personalities; Walvin, Black Presence; and Little, Negroes in Britain.

  101. Walvin, England, Slaves, and Freedom, 27.

  102. I borrow the concept of “political unconscious” from Jameson, Political Unconscious, 17–102.

  103. Walvin, England, Slaves, and Freedom, 27. Walvin is discussing the specific examples of England here, but his example could be said to apply to the whole of Britain after the Act of Union. If there is slippage between Britishness and Englishness here and elsewhere, it is because after the Act of Union of 1707, Scottish interests tended to be sublimated to English debates, especially in matters of empire. I discuss this problem in Gikandi, Maps of Englishness. See also Colley, Britons, 11–12.

  104. Walvin, England, Slaves, and Freedom, 33. A similar set of paradoxes and complexities were at work in France, too, where the emergence and consolidation of a culture of liberty went hand in hand with the development of the slave trade. For this, see McCloy, Negro in France; Peabody, There Are No Slaves in France; and C. Miller, French Atlantic Triangle.

  105. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 35.

  106. For Marx's classical terms, see the preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 9–15.

  107. Brewer, “Culture as Commodity,” 353.

  108. C. Miller, French Atlantic Triangle, 9.

  109. The terms here are borrowed from Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger, 1–6, and In the Wilderness, especially chapter 3.

  110. I return to this topic in subsequent chapters, but see Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence, and M. Smith, How Race Is Made.

  111. Douglas, In the Wilderness, 25.

  112. Finley, Ancient Slavery, 60.

  113. Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery, 5.

  114. Wish, “Aristotle, Plato,” 83.

  115. Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery, 5.

  116. Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, 244.

  117. Quoted in J. White and R. White, Slavery in the American South, 113. My argument here is indebted to Page DuBois's, Slaves and Other Objects, 3–31.

  118. Indigenous African slavery is the subject of Perbi's excellent book, A History of Indigenous Slavery. Other important studies of slavery in Africa can be found in Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa.

  119. Debates on the political economy of slavery are outside the scope of this project, but for a long historical view, see Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade; Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery; Barker, African Link; Eltis, Rise of African Slavery; Searing, West African Slavery; E. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery.

  120. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 4–5. See also Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic.

  121. Quoted in Jordan, White over Black, 74. My discussion of the haunting of freedom by the ghosts of slavery relies heavily on Jordan's discussion of colonial encounters in America. See also Davis's Problem of Slavery in Western Culture; and Vaughan, Roots of American Racism. For colonial encounters in the Atlantic world, see the essays collected in Canny and Pagden, Colonial Identity; Canny, Oxford History; and Marshall, Oxford History. For the cultural traffic between Africa and the Americas, see Thornton, Africa and Africans.

  122. Quoted in Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 15.

  123. Ibid.

  124. Davis, Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 13.

  125. Schama, Embarrassment of Riches. There were important counterpoints to Schama's history, including Blakely, Blacks in the Dutch World; and Burck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti.” Schama's later work on slavery and abolitionism, Rough Crossings, can be read as a rectification of his prior omissions, but it begs one of the questions informing my study: why and how can European domestic culture and slavery be treated as part of the same register?

  126. Slavery is barely mentioned in C. Taylor, Sources of the Self and Secular Age, or in Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age; Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment; or Habermas, Philosophical Discourse; it is barely present in Porter, Enlightenment or English Society; Wahrman's revisionist work, Making of the Modern Self, devotes only a few pages to the question of slavery itself.

  127. Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 31.

  128. De Bolla, Art Matters, 143.

  129. Colley, Britons, 6. I had taken up and developed this point in Maps of Englishness.

  130. Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 12.

  131. Nussbaum and Brown, New Eighteenth Century, 5.

  132. Wilson, introduction to New Imperial History, 1, 3. Wilson provides an outstanding revisionist account of nations, empires, and identities in the eighteenth century in Island Race.

  133. Ibid., 1.

  134. Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, xv.

  135. Ibid.; emphasis is mine.

  136. For Wahrman, see ibid; for Foucault, see afterword to Michel Foucault.

  137. The work on slave culture is too extensive to cover here, but for antebellum slavery, I have found the following general studies useful: Berlin, Many Thousands Gone; Blassingame, Slave Community and Slave Testimony; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll; Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness; Stuckey, Slave Culture; and D. White, Ar'n't I a Woman? For slave culture in Jamaica, my West Indian case study, see Brathwaite, Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica; and Patterson, Sociology of Slavery.

  138. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 13.

  139. Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 242.

  140. Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens.

  141. Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe,” 6.

  142. Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery, 1–2.

  143. Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 13.

  144. Daston, “Historical Epistemology,” 282.

  145. Quoted in C. Miller, French Atlantic Triangle, 39.

  146. Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 37.

  147. Wilson, introduction to New Imperial History, 16.

  148. Trouillot, “Anthropology and the Savage Slot.”

  149. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 82. Modern rationality is vigorously defended by Habermas in “Modernity: An Incomplete Project.”

  150. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, xxiv.

  151. Foucault, introduction to On the Normal and the Pathological, 12.

  152. Ibid.

  153. For the role of small stories in the larger hi
story of empire, see Colley, Captives Britain, 12; for the vulnerability of the imperial center, see Wilson, introduction, 17; for minorities and ethnics within Britain and the Atlantic world, see Kidd, “Ethnicity in the British Atlantic World” and his earlier British Identities before Nationalism.

  154. Nussbaum and Brown, New Eighteenth Century, 3.

  155. C. Hall, Civilising Subjects, 16–17.

  156. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 62–80.

  157. Ibid., 74.

  158. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 114–15. These questions have been raised by others, including D. Scott in Refashioning Futures and Conscripts of Modernity. See also Casid, Sowing Empire, especially chapter 1.

  159. Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 10.

  160. For the structure of difference before the eighteenth century, see Bartra, Wild Men in the Looking Glass; E. Hall, Inventing the Barbarian; Hartog, Mirror of Herodotus; and Hodgen, Early Anthropology.

  161. Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 3.

  162. This is the subject of important work by Curtin, Image of Africa; Cohen, French Encounter with Africans; and Hammond and Jablow, Africa That Never Was.

  163. Gilman, “Figure of the Black,” 373. My discussion here is heavily indebted to Gilman. See also Popkin, “Philosophical Basis,” 245–62.

  164. Gilman, “Figure of the Black,” 374.

  165. Quoted in Ibid., 374–75.

  166. E. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 131–32. For Burke and the Chelsden experiment, see Gilman, “Figure of the Black”; M. Armstrong, “Effects of Blackness,” 213–36; and Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 192–200.

  167. For these two versions of the sublime, see De Bolla, Discourse of the Sublime; and Paulson, “Burke's Sublime,” 241–69.

  168. Wheeler, Complexion of Race, 7; emphasis in the original.

  169. Ibid.

  170. Metz, Imaginary Signifier, 61.

  171. Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” 3. See also Crary, Techniques of the Observer.

  172. For these terms, see Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy.

  173. See Cavazzi de Montecúccolo, Descrição historica dos três reinos do Congo; Pifagetta, Report of the Kingdom of Congo; and Dapper, Description de l'Afrique. For a study of these colonial encounters, see Mudimbe-Boyi, Essais sur les Cultures en Contact.

  174. This point has been made by Bassani and Fagg in Africa and the Renaissance Art, 45.

  175. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism, 210. See also Segal, Solo in the New Order.

  176. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism, 210.

  177. Jordan, White over Black, 11.

  178. See Reilly, “Race and Racism,” 126. For Hawkins and his crest, see E. Jones, Elizabethan Image of Africa, 17, illustration 6. Hawkins's role in the beginning of the slave trade is discussed by Hazlewood, Queen's Slave Trader; and Pollitt, “John Hawkins's Troublesome Voyages,” 26–40.

  179. Davis, Problem of Slavery, 447. Eric Williams, in Capitalism and Slavery, argues that debates on the origins of slavery had given a “racial twist” to what was “basically an economic phenomenon” and that slavery “was not born of racism; rather racism was the consequence of slavery” (7), but the centrality of anti-black racism in the development of the peculiar institution is now established in the canonical literature, especially on the antebellum South and the West Indies. In addition to Jordan and Davis, see the conclusions by E. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, especially chapter 16; Vaughan, Roots of American Racism, chapter 7; and Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, chapter 1.

  180. E. Morgan, American Slavery, 44–70.

  181. Vaughan, Roots of American Racism, 11, 13. See also Parry, Image of the Indian and the Black Man.

  182. John C. Miller, Wolf by the Ears, 65. See also Jordan, White over Black, 429–81.

  183. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 138.

  184. Ibid., 140.

  185. Quoted in John C. Miller, Wolf by the Ears, 62.

  186. See Long, History of Jamaica 2:351–53.

  187. Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, 13.

  CHAPTER TWO. INTERSECTIONS: TASTE, SLAVERY, AND THE MODERN SELF

  1. Larpent, Woman's View of Drama, entry for April 24, 1797. For a discussion of the diaries and Larpent's interest in performance, see Colombo in “This Pen of Mine Will Say Too Much.” Useful background for women in the period can be found in Vickery's Gentleman's Daughter.

  2. Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, 56–75.

  3. Derrida, Archive Fever, 3.

  4. Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, 375–76.

  5. Ibid., 482.

  6. Ibid., 491.

  7. Ibid., 493.

  8. Ibid., 494–95.

  9. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 1–2.

  10. Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, 56.

  11. Ibid., 57.

  12. Ibid.

  13. For the centrality of the eighteenth century in the making of modern identity, see C. Taylor, Sources of the Self; Habermas, Structural Transformation; and Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self.

  14. R. Williams, Keywords, 99.

  15. Larpent, Woman's View of Drama, entry for April 26, 1797.

  16. The major work on the concept of the public sphere is Habermas, Structural Transformation. For debates on Habermas's definition of the public sphere, see Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere.

  17. Bermingham, “Elegant Females,” 509. For the paradox of feminine sensibility, see Nussbaum, Limits of the Human, especially chapter 2.

  18. At the beginning of the novel, Jane Eyre compares her oppressors to slave masters and her revolting mood to that “of the revolted slave…bracing me with its bitter vigour.” See Brontë, Jane Eyre, 18.

  19. If we are to argue that the aesthetization of women imprisoned them in the prison house of irrational male desires, as Bermingham seems to suggest, then we will miss the opening that the culture of taste provided for them. I think this is the point Nancy Armstrong was making in her revisionist account of the English novel: “I know of no history of the English novel that can explain why women began to write respectable fiction near the end of the eighteenth century, became prominent novelists during the nineteenth century, and on this basis achieved the status of artists during the modern period. Yet that they suddenly began writing and were recognized as women writers strikes me as a central event in the history of the novel.” See Desire and Domestic Fiction, 7.

  20. Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, 59.

  21. The link between identity and moral orientation has been made by Charles Taylor: “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.” See Sources of the Self, 28.

  22. Reynolds's painting is discussed by Pawlowicz in “Reading Women,” 47. For a majestic exploration of the relation between the book, the painting, and the text, see G. Stewart, The Look of Reading; and Warner, “Staging Readers Reading.”

  23. For an overview of Hogarth's career, see Hallett and Riding, Hogarth.

  24. Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, 59.

  25. I use the term “world picture” in the Heideggerian sense; it does not mean “a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture.” See Heidegger, “Age of the World Picture,” 129.

  26. Humphreys, “Arts in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” 5.

  27. See Brewer, Sinews of Power, xv. See also Langford, Polite and Commercial People; and Marshall, Eighteenth Century.

  28. Heidegger, “Age of the World Picture,” 128.

  29. See De Bolla, Discourse of the Sublime, 4–23.

  30. Quoted by Caygill, Art of Judgement, 38. My discussion here is indebted to Caygill.

  31. Kames, Elements of Criticism, front matter, 6.

  32. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 37.

  33. See Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, 13–69.

&nb
sp; 34. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 3:362.

  35. Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 1. For the long architectural history of Castle Howard, see Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 259–68.

  36. Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 1.

  37. McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, 9.

  38. Elias, Civilizing Process.

  39. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, 42–44.

  40. Brewer, “‘Most Polite Age’,” 348.

  41. Shaftesbury, “Sensus Communis,” in Characteristics of Men, 1:46. See also Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness and “Politeness for Plebes.”

  42. Shaftesbury, “Sensus Communis,” in Characteristics of Men, 1:46.

  43. Ibid.

  44. Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 260, 264.

  45. See Addison and Steele, Spectator, 1:31.

  46. For writing under erasure (sous rature) as it has evolved from Martin Heidegger to Jacques Derrida, see Spivak, translator's preface to Of Grammatology, xiv-xvii. On the repertoire and the archive, see D. Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire, 1–52.

  47. See Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa.

  48. Park, Travels, 473.

  49. Ibid.

  50. Ibid., 474.

  51. I use the term moral luck loosely here to refer to Park's inability to assign blame to any of the agents in the transactions he was observing. For the origin and meaning of the term in philosophy, see B. Williams, Moral Luck, 20–39.

  52. In Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor uses the term ordinary life “to designate those aspects of human life concerned with production and reproduction, that is, the labour, the making of the things needed for life” (211). In the society described by Park, slaves were some of the important things needed for life as they would be in the European and colonial societies that purchased them.

  53. Park, Travels, 475–76.

  54. Ibid., 475.

  55. Ibid.

  56. This distinction has been highlighted by C. Miller in French Atlantic Triangle, 11–13.

  57. Park, Travels, 495.

  58. Ibid., 497.

  59. Ibid.

  60. For this argument, see Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 7–8, and De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 70–90.

  61. On slavery and modern time, see Gilroy, Black Atlantic; W. Johnson, “Time and Revolution in African America,” 197–215; and Hartman, “Time of Slavery.”