47. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 27. The most complete and compelling discussion of Douglass's reservations about the “fraught pleasures” of slave entertainment can be found in Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 47–50.
48. Douglass, Life and Times, 596.
49. A distinctive mark of slave studies since the 1970s is the role assigned to culture in general—and performance in particular—as evidence of the African's capacity to evade social death. Culture is the subject of influential works, including Stuckey, Slave Culture; and Levine, Black Culture. Culture occupies a pivotal role in revisionist works on slavery such as Blassingame, Slave Community; and Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll. A specific engagement with forms of performance as the essence of slave cultural life is evident in Abrahams and Zwed, After Africa; and Abrahams, Singing the Master. See also White and White, Stylin'.
50. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 56.
51. Ibid.
52. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 45.
53. Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments, 15–16.
54. Prince, History of Mary Prince, 13–14.
55. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life, 53.
56. Douglass, Narrative of the Life, 58.
57. This was the view espoused by Elkins in Slavery. Its most powerful counterpoint was perhaps Blassingame, Slave Community.
58. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 8–9.
59. This is the subject of two books by Wood: Blind Memory and Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography.
60. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 141.
61. Ibid., 135.
62. Ibid., 136.
63. C. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 28.
64. Ibid.
65. Falconbridge, Account of the Slave Trade, 19–20.
66. Ibid., 20.
67. Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments, 15.
68. Falconbridge, Account of the Slave Trade, 20.
69. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 101–9. For slavery and space, see Kaye, Joining Places, 1–29.
70. Clarkson, History of the Rise, 115–17. On the history of the slave ship Brookes and anti-abolitionist imagery, see Lapsansky, “Graphic Discord,” 20130; Finley, “Committed to Memory,” 2–21; Wood, Blind Memory, 14–77; and Rediker, Slave Ship, 308–42.
71. Quoted in Foster, “New Raiments of Self,” 69.
72. Lovejoy and Law, Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, 153. See also Buckridge, Language of Dress, 16–66.
73. Hair, Jones, and Law, Barbot on Guinea, 85.
74. Ibid, 93.
75. Buckridge, Language of Dress, 26.
76. A. Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, 20.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid, 22.
79. Prince, History of Mary Prince, 14.
80. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 108.
81. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 53.
82. In West African societies such as the Mande, where there were no visible divisions of race, class, or religion, cultural hierarchies were maintained and enforced through patronyms, which often were transformed into what Perinbam terms “enduring universal signifiers.” See Family Identity and the State, 13. See also Lovejoy, “Ethnic Designations,” 9–42; Searing, ‘”No Kings, No Lords, No Slaves'”; McLaughlin, “Senegal,” 91; and Conrad, Status and Identity, 150.
83. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 63.
84. Walcott, “The Sea History,” in Collected Poems, 365. For a powerful representation of this vast emptiness, see Huggins, Black Odyssey, 50–53; and Small-wood, Saltwater Slavery, 33–64.
85. Hayden, “Middle Passage,” in Collected Poems, 48. For other poetic and artistic invocations of the “unspeakable event” see Brathwaite, Arrivants; C. Johnson, Middle Passage; Feelings, Middle Passage; and Dawes, Requiem. On slavery and the political economy of death, see Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death; and V. Brown, Reaper's Garden. 2008.
86. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 182.
87. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 62–63.
88. The issue here is not that black slaves were not associated with powerful negative senses; the point is that the economy of senses adduced to them was precisely what excluded them from the domain of the human subject. For race, slavery, and the senses, see M. Smith, How Race Is Made, 11–28.
89. Ellis notes that the terms sensibility and sentiment “denote a complex field of meanings and connotations in the late eighteenth century, overlapping and coinciding to such an extent as to offer no obvious distinction”; see Politics of Sensibility, 7.
90. Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, 114; 118.
91. Menke, “Modernity, Subjectivity,” 40.
92. Ibid.
93. In Kramnick, Portable Enlightenment Reader, 318–19. C. Taylor discusses Hutcheson's moral philosophy in relation to the senses in Sources of the Self, 259–65.
94. Caygill, Art of Judgement, 85.
95. Foucault, Order of Things, 222.
96. Ibid., 223, 226.
97. A. Smith, Inquiry into the Nature, front matter, 8.
98. Ibid., 36.
99. C. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 286.
100. Menke, “Modernity, Subjectivity,” 35.
101. Ibid., 36.
102. See, for example, De Bolla, Discourse of the Sublime.
103. In Kramnick, Portable Enlightenment Reader, 638.
104. Quoted in Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 3–4.
105. Cited in Blaustein and Zangrando, Civil Rights and African Americans, 149.
106. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 5.
107. Long, History of Jamaica, 2:352.
108. Ibid., 2:425–26. My discussion here is indebted to M. Smith, How Race Is Made.
109. Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, 1:14. Kames is discussed by Jordan in White over Black, 245; and M. Smith, How Race Is Made, 14.
110. Goldsmith, History of the Earth, 106.
111. Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence, viii.
112. The most elaborate discussion of the Pharmakon as both remedy and cure is perhaps Derrida's “Plato's Pharmacy.”
113. Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence, ix.
114. Douglas, Purity and Danger, especially chapter 1.
115. Nettleford, Caribbean Cultural Identity, 1.
116. Irrespective of the inequality and exploitation that exists in a nation, argues B. Anderson, it “is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.” Imagined Communities, 7.
117. Stuckey, Slave Culture, 3–97.
118. R. Thompson, Faces of the Gods, 127–31.
119. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 187–206.
120. Lawal, “Reclaiming the African Past,” 292–98; R. Thompson, “African Art in Motion,” 17; and P. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 585–87.
121. Creolization in the Caribbean is the subject of seminal books by Brath-waite, Development of Creole Society; Glissant, Caribbean Discourse; and Warner-Lewis, Central Africa in the Caribbean.
122. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 166.
123. In addition to R. Thompson, Faces of the Gods, see Price, First Time; and Price and Price, Two Evenings in Saramaka.
CHAPTER SIX. THE ONTOLOGY OF PLAY: MIMICRY AND THE COUNTERCULTURE OF TASTE
1. British Museum, “Akan Drum”; J. King, First Peoples, First Contacts; Delbourgo, “Slavery in the Cabinet of Curiosities”; Sloan, Discovering the Enlightenment; and MacGregor, Sir Hans Sloane.
2. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 178.
3. Glissant, “Free and Forced Poetics,” 95.
4. Ibid.
5. My argument here is adopted from Certeau, Writing of History, 320. On the process by which Africans became American, see Gomez, Reversing Sail; G. Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities; Sidbury, Becoming African in America; Thornton, Africa and Africans; and Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery.
6. W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 146. For historical consciousness and the loss of place, see Certeau, Writing of History, 318–21.<
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7. W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 8–9.
8. Ibid.
9. Douglass, Narrative of the Life, 23.
10. Ibid. I'm working here with the concept of a hermeneutics of suspicion, borrowed from Ricoeur, who writes in relation to Freud that, “over against interpretation as restoration of meaning we shall oppose interpretation according to what I collectively call the school of suspicion.” See Freud and Philosophy, 32.
11. Douglass, Narrative of the Life, 23.
12. Ibid, 30.
13. W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 182.
14. Ibid., 182–83; and W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 114–15.
15. W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 114–15.
16. For detailed discussion of these issues see Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence; and Patterson, Rituals of Blood, especially chapter 2.
17. C. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 28.
18. Ibid., 29.
19. Kaye, Joining Places, 4.
20. Wynter, “Jonkonnu in Jamaica,” 35.
21. Patterson, Sociology of Slavery, 217.
22. Quoted in Wynter, “Jonkonnu in Jamaica,” 35.
23. B. Edwards, History Civil and Commercial, 183.
24. Ibid., 184.
25. McDonald, Goods and Chattels, 19; see also Patterson, Sociology of Slavery, 217.
26. Edelstein, “Vauxhall Gardens,” 203.
27. Jeffery, “Architecture,” 253.
28. Casid, Sowing Empire, 198. Other important studies of the “English” garden in the West Indies include Higman, Slave Populations, 210–13; D. Hall, In Miserable Slavery, chapter 8; and Tobin, ‘”And there raise yams.”
29. Casid, Sowing Empire, 196. For case studies of Jamaican plantations, see Higman, Montpelier, Jamaica, and Plantation Jamaica.
30. Kaye, Joining Places, 12.
31. Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 36–37. A summary of this debate can be found in Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, chapter 13. I owe my argument here to Ross Chambers, who first introduced me to Certeau and the theory of tactics. See his Room for Maneuver, xi-xx. For the play of oppositionality in the Caribbean, see Burton, Afro-Creole.
32. Certeau, Practice, 37.
33. B. Edwards, History Civil and Commercial, 161–62; emphasis in the original.
34. Ibid.
35. M. Scott, Tom Cringle's Log, 252.
36. P. Morgan, “Work and Culture.” See also P. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, especially part 1.
37. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves; and Carney, Black Rice.
38. My discussion here is indebted to P. Morgan, “Work and Culture,” 206–8.
39. Ibid., 223.
40. The problem of autonomy continues to plague the study of culture among the slaves, and the control or lack thereof of neighborhoods and provision gardens remains crucial to these debates. In the West Indies it seems logical to claim, after Patterson, that “there was a wide area in which the slaves' activities were economically and socially irrelevant to the masters.” See Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, 93. But even here, the absolute control that the masters had in matters of punishment, sexual violence, and social regulation is indisputable. In the antebellum South, there does not seem to be agreement on the degree of freedom that slaves could retain even when they secured some measure of control over what Kaye describes as “their intimate relations, work, trade, and religious practice” (Joining Places, 10). Kaye provides an excellent summary of American historiographic debates on the question of autonomy in his book and provides a plausible middle position between “autonomy and universal solidarity” (10). See also R. Scott, Degrees of Freedom, 253–69.
41. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 5.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 6.
44. Craton, Searching for the Invisible Man, 374. For slaves and their memories in the United States, see Yetman, Voices from Slavery; Berlin, Favreau, and Miller, Remembering Slavery; and Fabre and O'Meally, History and Memory.
45. Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 15.
46. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 285.
47. I borrow the notion of symbolic inversion from Barbara A. Babcock, who, following on the rhetoric work of Kenneth Burke, has elaborated how figures of speech work as forms of cultural negation and aesthetic reversal. Symbolic inversion is defined here “as any act of expressive behavior which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion presents an alternative to commonly held cultural codes, values, and norms be they linguistic, literary or artistic, religious, or social and political.” See Babcock, introduction to Reversible World, 14.
48. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 285.
49. Ibid.
50. C. Taylor, “Person,” 263.
51. Ibid., 266–67.
52. For the relationship between remembering, forgetting, and nation building, see B. Anderson, Invented Communities, chapter 11.
53. Ferguson, Uncommon Ground, 57.
54. Work Projects Administration, Drums and Shadows, 179.
55. Ferguson, Uncommon Ground, 75. See also Montgomery, Survivors from the Cargo.
56. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 47.
57. Vlach, Afro-American Tradition, 122–38, and Back of the Big House, 1.
58. Vlach, Afro-American Tradition, 122–38.
59. Ibid., 282.
60. In his discussion of the African house, Vlach rejects attempts to link its architecture to specific African cultures, arguing that the linguistic evidence does not support such a linkage in “either form or mode of construction” (Back of the Big House, 86). My interest is not in African and African American correspondences or influences but in the adducement of an Africanist origin as a way of countering the plantation complex and its hegemonic claims. I focus on the ontology of architecture, not its epistemology. For a discussion of the form, structure, and ontology of African architecture, see Denyer, African Traditional Architecture; Bourdier and Minh-Ha, African Spaces; Blair, Anatomy of Architecture; Prussin, “Introduction to Indigenous African Architecture”; and Elleh, African Architecture.
61. See Patton, African-American Art, 33. For a comprehensive history of Creoles and slaves in Louisiana, see G. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana. The Metoyer dynasty is the subject of Mill's Forgotten People.
62. Olmstead, Journeys in the Seaboard Negro Slave States, 641.
63. Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” 323; emphasis in the original.
64. Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 117. A summary of this debate can be found in Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, chapter 13.
65. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 65.
66. D. Scott, Conscripts of Modernity.
67. Ligon, True and Exact History, 48.
68. Sloane, Voyage to the Islands, xlviii-xlix.
69. Pinckard, Notes on the West Indies, 263.
70. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 140.
71. See Blassingame, Slave Community; and Stuckey, Slave Culture.
72. Douglass, Life and Times, 498.
73. For the role of performance in African American culture, see Elam and Krasner, African American Performance; and Brooks, Bodies in Dissent.
74. Ligon, True and Exact History, 280.
75. Leslie, New and Exact Account, 326.
76. Ibid., 327.
77. Lufman, Brief Account of the Island, 135.
78. For the background, see N. Anderson, “Music.”
79. B. Edwards, History Civil and Commercial, 102.
80. Ibid.
81. Jobson, Golden Trade, 133.
82. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 34.
83. Pinckard, Notes on the West Indies, 265–66.
84. Ibid., 265.
85. Reprinted in Abrahams and Zwed, After Africa, 293.
86. B. Edwards, History Civil and Commercial, 106.
87. See Lewis, Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, 62. Obeah is the subject of Earle's novel Obi; or, The History of Three-Finge
red Jack. For the literary context, see Aravamudan, introduction to Obi, 7-52; and A. Richardson, “Romantic Voodoo.” For the religious context, see Paravisini-Gebert and Fernandez-Olmos, Sacred Possessions; and Creole Religions of the Caribbean.
88. Hill, Jamaican Stage, 228.
89. Lewis, Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, 61.
90. Austin-Broos, Jamaica Genesis, 43. Myalism is the subject of Brodber's novel, Myal. In addition to Patterson's Sociology of Slavery, detailed historical explorations of Obeah and Myalism can be found in D. Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey, chapters 2 and 3; Schuler, Alas, Alas, Kongo; and Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 36–65.
91. Patterson, Sociology of Slavery, 188.
92. Long, History of Jamaica, 4:416–17.
93. Beckwith, Black Roadways, 143.
94. Lewis, Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, 222–23.
95. Patterson, Sociology of Slavery, 187.
96. Some of my interlocutors have accepted my contention that the work of culture among the slaves constituted a form of resistance but have disagreed with my description of performances as a counter-aesthetic. I insist on these forms of expressiveness as a counter-aesthetic for two reasons: First, slaves were aware of the aesthetic economies circulating in white culture. Evidence of this is that they sought to appropriate them (sensibility in the slave narrative, for example) or to mimic them (as in the case of the later John Canoe). Second, rituals and performances were not just responses against the established order; they also sought to discover a realm of experience outside that order seeking to affirm, in Joan Dayan's words, a way “back to the self, to an identity lost, submerged and denigrated.” This search for an alternative, imaginary experience was “nothing other than the ability to keep expressing the self, and acceding, if only temporarily, to a form of power that defies compromise.” See Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 74.
97. B. Edwards, History Civil and Commercial, 109. The critical terminology is from Kermode, Genesis of Secrecy.
98. B. Edwards, History Civil and Commercial, 109.
99. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 217.
100. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 17; emphasis in the original.
101. Latrobe, Journals of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, 204. For the cultural significance of Congo Square, see Roach, “Deep Skin,” 101–13.
102. Latrobe, Journals of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, 204. Latrobe's reaction to an Afro-Catholic funeral is discussed by Roach, Cities of the Dead, 60–62.
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