62. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 23. The ideas driving subjection in the cultures of enslavement are discussed by Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 1–14. Subjection and slavery are the topics of Hartman's Scenes of Subjection.
63. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 25–26.
64. Hartman provides one of the most compelling accounts of the mechanisms of subjection and economies of power and desire in Scenes of Subjection, 105–12.
65. Park, Travels, 499.
66. This point is underscored by Marsters in her introduction to a new edition of Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, 1–38. The story of Park's life can be found in Lupton, Mungo Park. For Park and women, see Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, 64–65. Park's contribution to imperial travel writing is considered by Pratt in Imperial Eyes, 69–85.
67. Park, Travels, 499.
68. Georgiana, Duchess of Cavendish, “Anonymous,” 21.
69. My notion of a rhetoric of reading is derived from De Man's Allegories of Reading, 3–19.
70. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 35–76. For identity or nonidentity in the space of death, see Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man, 3–36.
71. Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, 106.
72. For the relationship between conviviality and melancholy, see Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, 121–52.
73. For the political unconscious, see Jameson, Political Unconscious; emphasis in the original.
74. Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 59–60; emphasis in the original.
75. Kristeva, Black Sun, 21.
76. Ibid.; emphasis in the original.
77. Hayden, “Middle Passage,” 48.
78. A detailed discussion of happiness as a category of virtue can be found in Potkay, Passion for Happiness.
79. Plumb, Commercialization of Leisure, 3; see also McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society.
80. Porter, “Enlightenment in England,” 10.
81. Plumb, Commercialization of Leisure, 18.
82. Porter, “Enlightenment in England,” 14.
83. For Scotland, see the essays collected in Dwyer and Sher, Sociability and Society. Johnson and Hume are discussed in Potkay, Passion for Happiness, chapter 3.
84. Addison, Spectator, vol. 2, no. 383 (1712). A brief history of Vauxhall Gardens can be found in Edelstein, “Vauxhall Gardens,” 203–15.
85. See Cameron and Crooke, Liverpool; and Dresser and Giles, Bristol and Transatlantic Slavery. See also D. Richardson, “Liverpool and the English Slave Trade.”
86. Thornton, “Africa: The Source,” 42.
87. R. Williams, Country and the City, 165.
88. Decorse, Archeology of Elmina, 28.
89. Van Dantzig, Forts and Castles of Ghana, 15. See also Feinberg, Africans and Europeans in West Africa; Lawrence, Fortified Trade-Posts; and Hansen, Coast of Slaves.
90. Van Dantzig, Forts and Castles of Ghana, 13.
91. Bosman, New and Accurate Description, 42.
92. Ibid., 47.
93. It is important to underscore the fact that the slave trade began as a business interest, a fact reflected in the charter setting up the Royal African Company and in the minutes of many boards of trade engaged in this enterprise. For the complete text of the charter, see Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History, 1:180; examples of the minutes of the company can be found at 2:250. A comprehensive history of the company can be found in K. Davies, Royal African Company.
94. The account is reproduced in Dow, Slave Ships and Slaving, 63.
95. Newton, Journal of a Slave Trader, 58.
96. Ibid.
97. Ibid., 95.
98. For Newton's paradoxical life in the slave trade, see Hochschild, Bury the Chains, 11–29; and Rediker, Slave Ship, 157–86.
99. Quoted in Cameron and Crooke, Liverpool, 41.
100. In addition to Newton's journal, see Snelgrave, New Account of Guinea; and Gamble, Slaving Voyage to Africa and Jamaica.
101. Newton, Journal of a Slave Trader, 84.
102. Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 8.
103. For a summary of the arguments and debates, see Lawson, “Locke and the Legal Obligations,” 131–50.
104. Long, Candid Reflections, 4.
105. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 53. My concern here is not the real-lived life of these slaves but the way they imagined their experiences. An excellent investigation of Equiano's complicated life can be found in Carretta, Equiano the African. For background and detailed studies of early African American writing, see Carretta and Gould, Genius in Bondage; Sidbury, Becoming African in America; and Sandiford, Measuring the Moment.
106. Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments, 15.
107. Wheatley, Complete Writings, 13; emphasis added to title, original emphasis on “Pagan land.”
108. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 68. The idea of the “talking book” has been explored by Gates in Signifying Monkey, 127–69; and Callahan, Talking Book, 1–19.
109. Douglass, Narrative of the Life, 96.
110. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, 5.
111. Hegel, preface to Phenomenology, 20.
112. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, 6.
113. The observer is James Barbot from a journal kept in 1698–1699, parts of which are abstracted in Dow, Slave Ships and Slaving, 83.
114. Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiment, 15.
115. Snelgrave, New Account of Guinea, 171.
116. Wilson, introduction to New Imperial Histories, 5.
117. Douglass, Narrative of the Life, 19. This argument has been made powerfully by Hartman in Scenes of Subjection; and Patterson, Rituals of Blood.
118. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 129–30. Foucault's argument is that in the eighteenth century this spectacle disappeared from the public view, considered to be at odds with modern sensibilities (perhaps); I will argue in later chapters that it was just exported to slave cultures. For the symbolism of violence, see Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 3.
119. Snelgrave, New Account of Guinea, 183–84.
120. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 25.
121. Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 37.
122. Goveia, West Indian Slave Laws, 19.
123. Ibid., 21.
124. For a detailed discussion of the case, see Shyllon, Black People, chapters 6 and 7.
125. National Archives, “Somersett Case, Howell's State Trials.”
126. Goveia, West Indian Slave Law, 20.
127. Quoted in ibid. On English reactions to the Stowell decision vis. Grace Jones, see Shyllon, Black People, 210–29.
128. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws, Avalon Project, ch. 1, p. 123. My discussion here is indebted to Shyllon.
129. Ibid., ch. 14, p. 412.
130. Quoted in Shyllon, Black People, 60.
131. Ibid., 61.
132. The irony in this wrangle is that Lord Mansfield himself was a Scot, educated at Oxford.
133. Quoted in Shyllon, Black People, 179.
134. Boswell, Life of Johnson, 877–78.
135. Ibid., 878.
136. Ibid.
137. Shyllon, Black People, 177.
CHAPTER THREE. UNSPEAKABLE EVENTS: SLAVERY AND WHITE SELF-FASHIONING
1. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 96–97. For Equiano's aspirations toward culture, see Carretta, Equiano, the African and “Property of Author”; Nussbaum, “Being a Man”; Sandiford, Measuring the Moment; and Sidbury, Becoming African in America.
2. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 99.
3. Ibid., 129.
4. Quoted in Schlereth, Cosmopolitan Ideal, 1.
5. See ibid., xiii.
6. Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 37.
7. Ibid., 36.
8. For the terms of debate here, see Douglas, Purity and Danger, 2–4.
9. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection.
10. Caygill, Art of Judgement, 75.
11. Hume, “Of the Standard of Tas
te.”
12. Mortensen, Art in the Social Order, 101.
13. Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 326.
14. Ibid., 328.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 325; emphasis in the original.
17. Ibid. 326.
18. Hume, “Of National Characters,” 213.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. The literature on the imbrication of the colonies in the making of English high culture is too extensive to cite here, but see Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans; Armitage, Ideological Origins; Colley, Britons; C. Hall, Civilising Subjects; and the essays collected in Wilson, New Imperial History.
22. Kant, “Observations,” 638.
23. For the shift from physical nature to culture as a signifier of difference, see Wheeler, Complexion of Race, 177–233; and Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, 113–17. As I argued in chapter 1, the distinction between blackness as a physical category and as a sign of cultural distinctiveness seems more blurred in the aesthetic ideology than Wheeler and Warhman have suggested.
24. This argument has made by Morrison in Playing in the Dark, 6.
25. See Ronnick, “Francis Williams,” 4.
26. See, for example, Grégoire, Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties.
27. Long, History of Jamaica, 2:484.
28. Ibid. For contrasting views on Long's place in the changing economies of race, see Wheeler, Complexion of Race, 177–233; and Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods.
29. For Williams's function in Long's attempt to fix the moral character of the black subject, see Long, History of Jamaica, 476–85. For latter-day attempts to recognize Williams as one of the founding fathers of a black Atlantic literary tradition, see D'Costa and Lalla, Voices in Exile, 9–12; see also Gates and McKay, Norton Anthology of African American Literature, xxx.
30. See Warhman, Making of the Modern Self, 13. My position here is closer to that articulated by Dayan in Haiti, History, and the Gods, 194.
31. Goveia, Study on the Historiography, 61. My discussion here is indebted to Dayan.
32. Hume's footnote represented then, as it does now, a form of prejudice that went against his whole philosophical project, against his insistence on the rule of evidence as an antidote to prejudice. The distinguished American philosopher Richard Popkin captured the paradox at issue here in an intriguing parenthesis to an essay on Hume's racism:
(How could an alleged empiricist like Hume make such sweeping generalizations and ignore evidence to the contrary? Hume himself explained the matter in his discussion of general rules in the chapter of the Treatise on “unphilosophical probability.” He showed the psychological factors involved in people believing prejudicial general rules, such as “All Irishmen are quarrelsome,” in spite of counter-evidence. And, Hume seems to have been a perfect case of his own explanation of how prejudices can over-ride any evidence. In a letter he referred to his friend Isaac de Pinto, the Dutch economist and philosopher, as a good man “tho a Jew.” With Hume's prejudices, it is easy to see that he was a fine choice to run the Colonial office in 1766.)
Popkin, “Hume's Racism.” For Popkin's other work on Hume and the question of race, see “Philosophical Basis,” 245–62, and “Hume's Racism Reconsidered,” 64–75.
33. John C. Miller, Wolf by the Ears, 77.
34. Quoted in ibid.
35. Gates, Trials of Phillis Wheatley, 51; and Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 139. Jefferson's tortured views on black lack are discussed by Jordan in White over Black, 429–81.
36. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 139.
37. Ibid., 140.
38. Ibid.
39. Laplanche and Pontalis, Language of Psychoanalysis, 362.
40. Ibid., 103.
41. Ibid., 292. For the structuralist or Marxist version of this sense of contradiction, see Althusser, “Contradiction and Over-Determination.”
42. Walvin, Fruits of Empire, ix.
43. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, xxv.
44. Ibid.
45. Walvin, Fruits of Empire, 122–23.
46. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 190.
47. E. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 23. See also Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1–32, and Making of New World Slavery, especially chapter 10.
48. Calder, Revolutionary Empire, 254.
49. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 189.
50. Quoted in E. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 85.
51. Ragatz, Fall of the Planter Class, vii.
52. Calder, Revolutionary Empire, 473.
53. Quoted in E. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 44.
54. See International Slavery Museum, “Liverpool and the Slave Trade,” International Slavery Museum. My sources on Liverpool and the slave trade include Tibbles, Transatlantic Slavery; and Cameron and Crooke, Liverpool.
55. Bohls, “Disinterestedness and Denial,” 16.
56. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 211.
57. Quoted in ibid.
58. I owe this argument to Charles Taylor; see Sources of the Self, especially chapter 17.
59. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 201.
60. Schaw, Journal of a Lady of Quality, 99–100.
61. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 290.
62. See Alleyne and Fraser, Barbados Carolina Connection, 53–55.
63. Ibid., 291.
64. Ragatz, Fall of the Planter Class, 6.
65. Long, History of Jamaica, 2:76.
66. Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 383.
67. Ibid., 297.
68. Ibid., 301.
69. Harlow, Christopher Codrington, 91.
70. Calder, Revolutionary Empire, 412.
71. For this account see Bennett, Bondsmen and Bishops; and Puckrein, Little England. The Codrington estate is discussed briefly in Hochschild, Bury the Chains, 64–68; and Calder, Revolutionary Empire, 413.
72. Harlow, Christopher Codrington, passim.
73. Long, History of Jamaica, 2:269.
74. Calder, Revolutionary Empire, 413.
75. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 9. For Schiller's aesthetic project, see Woodmansee, Author, Art, and the Market, chapter 3; and Docherty, Criticism and Modernity, chapter 6.
76. Harlow, Christopher Codrington, 11.
77. Ibid., 47.
78. Ibid., 42.
79. White Creoles were people of European descent born in the Americas or the colonial Caribbean. Their cultural history can be found in Long, History of Jamaica, 2:260–319. The most authoritative studies of Creole culture in the Caribbean are Brathwaite, Development of Creole Society; and Lambert, White Creole Culture. See also Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods, especially chapter 3. For the anxieties of West Indian Creoles, see Lambert, White Creole Culture, chapter 6; Sandiford, Cultural Politics of Sugar, 150–76; and Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 214–29. Lewis is discussed by Sandiford in Cultural Politics of Sugar, 150–74.
80. Edwardes, Nabobs at Home, 13.
81. See Warren, “The Building of Dodington Park.”
82. Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 328.
83. De Bolla, Discourse of the Sublime, 28.
84. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 89.
85. Byron, “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,” Canto I, XXIL, p. 6.
86. Quoted by Hewat-Jaboor in “Fonthill House,” 51.
87. Mannings, “Visual Arts,” 133.
88. Boswell, Life of Johnson, 742.
89. P. Anderson, Over the Alps, 118.
90. Hauptman, “Clinging Fast,” 73.
91. Beckford, Dreams, Waking Thoughts, 191.
92. Ibid.
93. Shaffer, “‘To Remind us of China’.”
94. Ibid., 210.
95. Quoted in ibid., 216.
96. See ibid., 217.
97. Ibid.
98. Wordsworth, quote from “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” 21.
99. Shaffer, “‘To Remind Us of China’,” 220.
100. For de
tailed discussions of the Beckford collection, see the essays by David Watkin, Bet McLeod, and Oliver Impey and John Whitehead in Ostergard, William Beckford.
101. Fothergill in Beckford of Fonthill, 126.
102. Quoted in Lees-Milne, William Beckford, 7.
103. For the political unconscious, see Jameson, Political Unconscious, 17–60.
104. Hewat-Jaboor, “Fonthill House,” 51.
105. Ibid.
106. Hauptman in William Beckford, 73.
107. McLeod, “Celebrated Collector,” 155.
108. Fothergill, Beckford of Fonthill, 14.
109. See Mowl, “William Beckford.”
110. Fothergill, Beckford of Fonthill, 16.
111. Jeffery, “Architecture,” 234.
112. Quoted in Lees-Milne, William Beckford, 13.
113. Edwardes, Nabobs at Home, 34.
114. Lees-Milne, William Beckford, 13.
115. For Horace Walpole and the culture of gardening, see Symes, “English Taste in Gardening,” 260. A brief discussion of the West Indian “great house” can be found in Buisseret, Historic Architecture, 10–16.
116. My terms here are borrowed from R. Williams, “Forms of Fiction,” 1–7.
117. Watkin, “Beckford, Soane, and Hope,” 33.
118. Ibid.
119. D. Armstrong, Old Village and the Great House, 27.
120. R. Williams, “Forms of Fiction,” 5.
121. Melville, Life and Letters, 350.
122. Laplanche and Pontalis, Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, 118.
123. Alexander, England's Wealthiest Son, 156–57.
124. Alexander, Life at Fonthill, 268.
125. Melville, Life and Letters, 28.
126. Elsner and Cardinal, introduction to Cultures of Collecting, 5.
127. This is the view expressed by Fothergill in Beckford of Fonthill, 70, 170. Beckford's relationship with Courtney is discussed in detail by Alexander in England's Wealthiest Son; see especially chapters 5 and 12. For William Beckford's aesthetic life, see Lees-Milne, William Beckford.
128. Ostergard, William Beckford, 33.
129. Baudrillard, “Culture of Collecting,” 7.
130. McLeod, “Celebrated Collector,” 161.
131. Ibid.
132. Baudrillard, “Culture of Collecting,” 8.
133. Ibid., 10.
134. Lees-Milne, William Beckford, 44.
Slavery and the Culture of Taste Page 41