Slavery and the
Culture of Taste
Simon Gikandi
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gikandi, Simon.
Slavery and the culture of taste / Simon Gikandi.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-14066-7 (hardcover : acid-free paper) 1. Slavery in literature. 2. Slavery—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title.
PN56.S5765G55 2011
306.3'6209033-dc22 2011007380
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Sabon and Pelican
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my beloved children:
Samani Gakure Gikandi,
Ajami-Halisi Simon Gikandi,
Halima-Rakiya Wanjiku Gikandi
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Overture: Sensibility in the Age of Slavery
2 Intersections: Taste, Slavery, and the Modern Self
3 Unspeakable Events: Slavery and White Self-Fashioning
4 Close Encounters: Taste and the Taint of Slavery
5 “Popping Sorrow”: Loss and the Transformation of Servitude
6 The Ontology of Play: Mimicry and the Counterculture of Taste
Coda: Three Fragments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
Epigraphs
Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
In that gray vault. The sea.
The sea Has locked them up. The sea is History.
—Derek Walcott, “The Sea Is History”
I start with Derek Walcott's poem because there is a sense in which this book is about the interlaced experiences of the enslaved—those people without monumental histories, battles, martyrs, or tribal memories—and those others, the cultured subjects of modernity, whose lives are available to us through the monuments and institutions of European civilization—what I call the culture of taste.1 This book is about the encounter between these two groups of modern subjects across the Atlantic, the sea that in our modern times connected the enslaved and their enslavers. But although the book spends considerable time sketching both the visible and invisible connections of two social practices or realms of experience that have been kept apart so that they can continue to do their cultural work, separately and unequally, it started as an almost casual reflection on the gray vault in which common histories are encrypted.
The informing epigraph, or even epitaph, to this project came from an idea, or at least the fragment of a thought, once encountered in the middle of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's “Mourning and Melancholia”: What are we to make of those experiences and losses that cannot be acknowledged because they seem to be at odds with the narrative of modern identity and must hence be encased in an “interpsychic tomb”?2 What are we to make of those events that cannot be visibly celebrated as part of our Western identity, because they seem to be at odds with its informing categories, and yet cannot be mourned, because to do so would contaminate the modes of our self-understanding as civilized subjects? This book is not about celebration or mourning; rather, it is an allegorical reading of spaces of repression in the making of the visible or invisible world. I seek to recover transatlantic slavery, often confined to the margins of the modern world picture, as one of the informing conditions of civilized culture; my goal is to find a language for reading what lies buried in the crypt, what survives in the “secret tomb” of modern subjectivity. In the crypt, note Abraham and Torok, “A whole world of unconscious fantasy is created, one that leads its own separate and concealed existence. Sometimes in the dead of the night, when libidinal fulfillments have their way, the ghost of the crypt comes back to haunt the cemetery guard, giving him strange and incomprehensible signals, making him perform bizarre acts, or subjecting him to unexpected sensations.”3
Working through the crypt of empire, this book was generated by the need to understand the ghosts lying in the crypts of the black and white Atlantic and the desire to fashion a method for reading the ghostly inside the symbolic economy of civility and civilization. Indeed, the genealogy of this project can be traced to an encounter I had with an early 1700 painting of James Drummond, famous Jacobite and presumptuous Earl of Perth, by the Flemish Scottish painter Sir John Baptiste de Medina (fig. 0.1). James Drummond was recognized as a leading figure in the Scottish Jacobite court in exile in France; he was closely associated with the rebellion to secure the throne for James Stewart, the pretender. Drummond, who became the Duke of Perth in 1716, did not captivate me because of any desire to understand the politics of the English succession or the Jacobite movement in Scotland, which I discovered from the novels of Sir Walter Scott as a student at the University of Edinburgh. What fascinated me about Medina's portrait was, first, Drummond's grandiose pose and, second, what appeared to be its dark counterpoint. In Medina's painting, the sharp colors associated with the Baroque (and a palpable sense of and theatricality) present the viewer with the portrait of the Jacobite as a young man—tall, well shaped, and dressed in armor. This was the pose of power.
In itself, this pose was not unusual. The use of armor as an insignia for the warrior king or prince, or the deployment of bright colors to depict the grandiose nature of the powerful can be detected in paintings of the British court since the early modern period. Famous examples of this pose of power include Sir Anthony van Dyck's portraits of Charles I on horseback. What was different in Medina's portrait of Drummond was the addition of a black boy, a slave with the collar of bondage around his neck, as a supplement to the sign of power and prestige. The inclusion of the slave in the portrait of the Jacobite as a young man raised some disturbing questions: Why would Drummond, a symbol of the Catholic insurrection against the Protestant establishment, seek to inscribe an enslaved boy in his family portrait? What aura did this figure, undoubtedly the quintessential sign of blackness in bondage, add to the symbolism of white power? What libidinal desires did the black slave represent? What was the relation of this blackness, confined to the margin of the modern world picture and placed in a state of subjection, to the man of power with his hand on his hip? And how were we to read this diminished, yet not unattractive, blackness in relation to the center embodied by the wig and armor? And where was one to draw the line between the gesture of incorporation and dissociation?
0.1 Sir John Baptiste de Medina, James Drummond, 2nd titular Duke of Perth, 1673-1720. Jacobite, about 1700. National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.
Walking through the archive of empire and the colonial library, I discovered, as have other scholars before me, that the juxtaposition of such scenes—and the interpretative questions that they raise—was not unusual. Indeed, as I worked on this project, trying to make connections that I initially thought existed on an experiential level and were simply denied or repressed by the institutions of interpretation, it occurred to me that the strange and incomprehensible signs of a black presence in the making of high culture often tended to slip away, not
because of the invisibility of the enslaved but because the construction of the ideals of modern civilization demanded the repression of what it had introjected—the experience or phenomenon that it had unconsciously assimilated. I was thus drawn to the meaning of those imaginative figures that were essential to modern self-understanding yet needed to be quarantined from the culture of modernity so that the civilizing process could continue. Cultural or conceptual quarantines seemed to be necessitated by the common belief that the black, as unmodern, was either a source of shame or a toxin that threatened the well-being of civilization. What surprised me in the end, however, was the discovery that the world of the enslaved was not simply the submerged and concealed counterpoint of modern civilization; rather, what made the body of the slave repellant—its ugliness and dirt—was also what provided the sensations and the guilty pleasures of modern life.
Hypothesis and Premises
My basic hypothesis in this book is that both the institution of slavery and the culture of taste were fundamental in the shaping of modern identity, and that they did so not apart but as nonidentical twins, similar yet different. I will show how, in this dialectic of identity and difference, slavery and taste came to be intimately connected even when they were structurally construed to be radical opposites; they would function as what Mary Douglas would call “rituals of purity and impurity” that nevertheless create “unity in experience.”4 For Douglas, reflections on dirt and impurity are also commentaries “on the relation of order to disorder, being to non- being, form to formlessness, life to death.”5 Often posited as a moral stain on modern identity, slavery could inform and haunt almost all attempts to construct a transcendental set of categories in areas as diverse as moral philosophy, law, aesthetics, and political economy. But for reasons that I explain in the first two chapters, my focus will be on the introjection of slavery into the realm of manners, civility, sense and sensibility.
The central arguments I present in each of the chapters—and their mode of presentation—will constantly call attention to both the structural connection and disconnection of slavery and the culture of taste. A central thesis of this book is that slavery and the culture of taste were connected by the theories and practices that emerged in the modern period; but I will not argue that they expressively enabled each other in a synchronic structure. On the contrary, I intend to show that these two experiences, though occupying opposite ends of the cultural spectrum, were, in their functions and affect, processes that took place at the same time in the same space and hence need to be studied in what Edward Said has called a “contrapuntal manner” and considered within the economy of what Fredric Jameson terms “expressive causality,” the process by which “two distinct regions of social life,” even when structurally unconnected, can still be considered to be part of “some general identity” especially at the phenomenological level.6
My goal in this book is not to show that the culture of taste and African slavery enabled each other or that enslavement and the ideals of high culture existed in binary opposition. Where evidence warrants it, as in the case studies I provide in the middle chapters, slavery and taste will be shown to have had an undeniable causal relation. In other instances, this relation will be much more discreet and indirect, hence demanding an analogical rather than historical approach. There will be moments of this book when the link between slavery and taste will inevitably appear tenuous; this is especially the case in the first two parts of the book, where I do not seek to establish direct or self-evident connections. What I set out to provide is not evidence from the archives but an allegory of reading, an exploration of the tropes and figures that often point, or lead, to sublimated connections. There are, however, key instances when slavery and taste existed as clear and undeniable binary oppositions. In the American and West Indian colonies, for example, ideals of taste could not be imagined or be secured except in opposition to a negative sensorium associated with slavery. In these cases, my interest is in how this relationship was structured and in the cultural politics that this binary demanded or generated.
Each of the six chapters in this book is informed by an interplay of slavery and the culture of taste as domains of difference and identity. The first chapter serves as an overture to the whole project, reflecting on the character and shape of sensibility in the age of slavery. Here, I explore how ideas and ideals about taste and beauty demanded powerful counterpoints built around notions of black difference. Focusing on British debates on the question of taste and the role of culture in the shaping of modern identity and the reality of enslavement and its objects, I use this chapter to reflect on how some of the most important ideas of bourgeois culture—namely, art and freedom—were mapped and haunted by their contaminating danger, manifestly represented by the racialized black body. I also use this chapter to locate my work within changing debates on empire and the symbolic economy of slavery.
Chapter 2 moves beyond the critical debates raised in chapter 1 to provide a more concrete narrative of the coexistence of taste and slavery as aesthetic objects and products of everyday life in the modern world. Here, I explore the link between slavery, consumption, and the culture of taste, all-important conduits for understanding modern identity. With a particular emphasis on changing theories of taste in eighteenth-century Britain, I provide an analysis or reading of the troubled relation between race, ideologies of taste, and the culture of consumption. I explore how slavery enabled the moment of taste; led to fundamental transformations in the self-understanding of modern subjects; and, consequently, resulted in a redefinition of notions of freedom, selfhood, and representation.
Having made the case that slavery informed key ideas on what it meant to be a man or woman of taste in the eighteenth century, I use the middle chapters of the book to make a more explicit link between the concept and practice of taste, within the British tradition, and the political economy of West Indian and American slavery. In chapter 3 I present two instances of how slave money shaped the moment of taste in both pragmatic and conceptual terms. I provide a substantive exploration of the cultural traffic between Britain and its colonial outposts in order to show how the experience of slavery was turned into an aesthetic object that was woven into the fabric of everyday life. I then seek to connect slave money and the power and prestige of art by focusing on the aesthetic lives of William Beckford and Christopher Codrington, famous heirs to slave fortunes, who sought to remake their social standing through the patronage of art and the mastery of taste.
In Chapter 4, I turn to the relationship between the violence of slavery and the culture of conduct within the geography of enslavement itself. Here, I reflect on the status of art and taste in the heart of American slavery. I argue that although members of the American plantocracy in Virginia (William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson, for example) sought to fashion their lives after those of British gentry, they could not separate themselves from the concrete materiality of plantation slavery. How, then, could a culture of taste be cultivated in the presence of a thriving slave economy? At the center of this chapter is the inescapable relation between the planters' striving for high culture and the deployment of violence as a mode of containing what was considered to be the danger of Africa. Africa and Africans enabled the wealth of the planter, but they needed to be exorcized so that white civilization could take hold in the new world.
Slavery simultaneously challenged and informed some of the central tenets of modern life; it presented a fundamental challenge to the redemptive capacity of art and taste; yet, as I show in chapters 5 and 6, African slaves in the Americas recognized the extent to which their own sense of selfhood depended on the cultivation of cultural spaces outside the regimen of enforced work and truncated leisure. The last two chapters of the book provide a study of the slaves' own response to their evacuation from the realm of taste and modern identity. Some famous former slaves like Olaudah Equiano and Phillis Wheatley sought to master and appropriate the culture of taste itself, but the slaves who interest
me in these two chapters are those who sought to develop what I call a counterculture of taste—those subjects who rejected the notions of order, rationality, and proper conduct that appealed to their masters—and created a cultural underground in what Frantz Fanon was later to term “the zone of occult instability” (desequilibre occulte).7
A Note on Method
While this work draws on various disciplines—history, philosophy, art history, aesthetics, and literary criticism—and has arguments with scholars in all of them, it is essentially a work of cultural criticism. It is not intended to be a monograph on eighteenth-century social history, the history of modern art, or aesthetic theory. From a historical perspective, my point of reference is the eighteenth century, because that is the age in which slavery and the culture of taste emerged and transformed the cultural landscape of Britain and the Americas. I spend considerable time in the archive of empire in the eighteenth century, because it was in that period when broad questions about taste and slavery became issues for intellectual debate. It was in the age of Enlightenment that slavery appeared to be anachronistic to how modern Europeans imagined themselves and their society. It is in the archive of the period that one could come across figures such as William Beckford regarded as elevated men of taste and patrons of the culture of consumption in England and then read about major slave revolts—for the planter class, the ultimate expression of African barbarism—taking place in their Jamaican plantations.
If the structure of this book appears bifurcated, it is because it is addressed to two audiences, both focused on the same object of analysis—cultures of empire—yet with divergent goals, terms of reference, and methodologies. For students of modern British culture, especially those invested powerfully in the aesthetic and the literary as the mark of cultural achievement, I think there is something useful to be learned about the cultural traffic between the plantations of Jamaica or the antebellum South and the emergence of forms of cultural expressions such as the Gothic. Was it incidental that the authors of two of the most important English Gothic novels, William Beckford (Vathek) and Matthew Gregory Lewis (The Monk), were both heirs to West Indian plantations and absentee slave masters? Even when the nature of the exact link between West Indian slavery and forms of Englishness might be debatable and should be debated, it is still important to know that the Coromantee rebellion that started in Ballard Beckford's frontier plantation in St. Mary's County, Jamaica, in 1760, transformed the language of Gothic. How colonial events entered the idiom of ordinary Englishness is one of the many concepts this book seeks to understand.
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