Slavery and the Culture of Taste

by Gikandi, Simon;

  For students of slave culture and the black Atlantic, already the subject of an immense archive, my goal was to cross the historical and social boundaries that have come to characterize studies of the enslaved. Indeed one of the virtues of the broadly cultural-studies approach I adopt here is that it provides me with the freedom to move across the vast landscape of slavery at a time when the immensity of the archive of enslavement has forced scholars to specialize in even narrower regions and periods. My book moves from the West African coast to Scotland, from the West Indies to the antebellum South and, occasionally, to Brazil and Argentina. I adopt this wide-angled approach both to underscore the existence of African slavery as a perversely unique global phenomenon and to provide a thick description for what was supposed to be absent in its theaters of action: an aesthetic experience among the enslaved.

  Finally, let me note that the style of this book and the mode of presentation I adopt are as important as the argument that I present. As my first two chapters indicate, I want to tell stories about two traditions that are often kept apart, and in order to do so, I interpolate and juxtapose experiences, eschewing linear structures and chronologies. Quite often, I dislocate categories and experiences in order to defamiliarize our understanding of modern culture. In other cases, I recover older terminologies, such as phenomenology, in order to redirect attention to experiences that are easily elided in the name of antiessentialism. Above all, I read slavery not simply as a shameful episode in modern culture and a sign of moral failure, but as a caesura, a point of division in the narrative of modernity, not a break from it. Here, slavery will be explored in its powerful and painful materiality, but it will also be read, in its figural or semiotic sense, as the sign of the social and moral boundaries that made modern culture possible, signaling who belonged and who was excluded, yet pointing to the ways in which inclusion and exclusion informed each other.

  Acknowledgments

  This book took a long time to write and, given its historical and geographic reach, depended on the expertise of both friends and strangers. An invitation by Linda Gregerson to give a talk at the Early Modern Seminar at the University of Michigan in 1997 gave rise to my initial thoughts on the relation between the institution of slavery and the culture of taste. I would like to thank Linda for inviting me to think of difference outside my period, and Valerie Traub, who wanted me to go even further back in time. My former colleagues at the University of Michigan created the interdisciplinary conditions in which this project was conceived. The late Lemuel Johnson was perhaps my most important interlocutor, and his resistance to my ideas often led me in productive directions. Larry Goldstein published an early version of what became chapter 2 in the Michigan Quarterly Review, and I thank him for his enthusiastic support. Ifeoma Nwankwo invited me back to Michigan to continue conversations about slavery and the making of modern culture with members of the Atlantic Studies Program and was instrumental in a later invitation to Vanderbilt University. I would like to take this opportunity to thank her for her collegiality and friendship.

  Early fragments of the book were presented as lectures or seminar papers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, at the invitation of Susan Stanford Friedman and Neil Whitehead, and at the University of London, where my friend Mpalive Msiska provided me with a forum for enlightened conversations. The middle (American) sections of the book were written during my membership in a working group on slavery and representation at Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. I am grateful to Deborah McDowell, John Stauffer, and David Blight for convening the working group. At the Yale workshop and later at Rutgers, Mia Bay provided me with important guidance in the area of historical investigation.

  Versions of the last part of the book benefited from the intervention of individuals and groups at several institutions where I was invited to share my research. Members of the postcolonial working group at Royal Holloway College nudged me to think about the meaning of slavery in the culture of the present, and I would like to thank Helen Gilbert and Elleke Boehmer for their hospitality and David Lambert for directing me to new work in the geography of the Atlantic world. At the University of Rostock, at a conference convened under the auspices of the Institute for English and American Studies, Gesa Makenthun and Raphael Hormann provided me with an opportunity to rethink the relation between the aesthetic and forms of bonded labor. Jay Clayton invited me to Vanderbilt University, where conversations with Ifeoma Nwankwo, Colin Dayan, Houston Baker, and Hortense Spillers pushed me in new directions. At the University of Minnesota, I had the privilege to present a version of the last chapter of the moment thanks to the efforts of Jani Scandura and her colleagues.

  The careful, sustained, and substantive reading of three tough anonymous readers immensely enriched this book. While I may have disagreed with some of their responses, I benefited from all of their criticism and thank them profusely for the energies they put into the book. At Princeton University, my chairs, Michael Wood and Claudia Johnson, created the ideal conditions for writing this kind of book, and their generosity and support enabled me to complete the work in a time of change and transition.

  At Princeton University Press, Hanne Winasky, with the able assistance of Adithi Kasturirangan and Christopher Chung, nurtured the book through what appeared to be a long process, and I thank her for her professionalism and friendship. Kathleen Cioffi guided the book through the production process with professionalism and care. Many thanks to Jill R. Hughes for copyediting the manuscript meticulously and for respecting my style. Sonya Posmentier was an invaluable research assistant. Valerie Smith and Abiola Irele provided me with unconditional friendship and intellectual mentorship, and my debts to both are immeasurable. My family lived with this book for so long that they cannot imagine a time when it didn't exist. Juandamarie Gikandi provided me with the comforts of home that made it all possible. I thank my children, Samani, Ajami, and Halima Gikandi, for bearing life under the shadow of the book, and I dedicate this work to them with love and devotion.

  1.1 Harmenszoon van Rijn Rembrandt, Two Negroes. 1661.

  Overture:

  Sensibility in the Age of Slavery

  Sometime around 1659, the Dutch painter Harmenszoon van Rijn Rembrandt sat in his studio in Amsterdam and commenced work on Two Negroes (fig. 1.1), considered one of the most compelling paintings of the last phase of his illustrious career. Working with African models and operating within a Dutch culture whose domestic economy was driven by the slave trade, Rembrandt sought to turn his black figures, people who most probably had arrived in the European Low Countries as slaves or servants, into elevated subjects through art. This gesture—the transformation of the most marginal figures in society into elevated works of art—was most evident in Rembrandt's keen sense of the contrast between the two African models. This difference was crucial because it implicitly questioned the undifferentiated image of the black as fetish or stereotype that was dominant in the records of Dutch travelers at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century. Rembrandt's Africans were certainly not the generalized villains that agents of the Dutch slave interests were observing on the West African coast—”all without exception, Crafty, Villainous, and Fraudulent,” according to William Bosman.1 On the contrary, these portraits were elevated to a position, common in the early modern period, in which blackness was associated with dignity, decency, and virtue, if not equality.2 We don't, of course, actually know who the men in the picture were, nor where they came from, but for students of the African image in the European imagination, Two Negroes had fulfilled a key tenet in theories of the aesthetic: the painter had used his genius to reclaim the human from the detritus of enslavement. Art had “ennobled this humanity.”3

  In the same year that Rembrandt was ennobling the black in the aesthetic sphere, affirming the humanity of the African in unmistakable and unequivocal terms, the Dutch merchant Pedro Diez Troxxilla wrote a receipt for the slaves
he had received from Matthias Beck, governor of Curaçao:

  I, underwritten, hereby acknowledge to have received from the Hon'ble Matthias Beck, governor over the Curaçao Islands, sixty two slaves, old and young, in fulfillment and performance of the contract concluded on the 26th June, A'o 1659, by Messrs. Hector Pieters and Guillaume Momma, with the Lords Directors at the Chamber at Amsterdam; and as the negroes by the ship Coninck Salomon were disposed of, long before the arrival of the undersigned, and the ship Eyckenboom, mentioned in the aforesaid contract, has not arrived at this date, the said governor has accommodated me, the undersigned, to the best of his ability with the abovementioned sixty two slaves, and on account of the old and young which are among the aforesaid negroes, has allowed a deduction of two negroes, so that there remain sixty head in the clear, for which I, the undersigned, have here according to contract paid to the governor aforesaid for forty six head, at one hundred and twenty pieces of eight, amounting to five thousand five hundred and twenty pieces of eight. Wherefore, fourteen negroes remain still to be paid for, according to contract in Holland by Messrs. Hector Pieters and Guillaume Momma in Amsterdam, to Messrs. the directors aforesaid, on presentation of this my receipt, to which end three of the same tenor are executed and signed in the presence of two undersigned trustworthy witnesses, whereof the one being satisfied the others are to be void. Curaçao in Fort Amsterdam, the 11th January, A'o 166o. It being understood that the above fourteen negroes, to be paid for in Amsterdam, shall not be charged higher than according to contract at two hundred and eighty guilders each, amounting together to three thousand nine hundred and twenty Carolus guilders.4

  The receipt was more than the customary acknowledgment of goods received; it was also a detailed inventory of objects of trade and the geography in which they were exchanged. And this correspondence, dated June 1659, can be read as a sample of the functional idiom of what would come to be known, in the verbal trickery of euphemism and understatement, as “The African Trade,” a triangular commerce joining the industrial centers of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. What made this trade unique in the history of the modern world was that its primary commodity was black bodies, sold and bought to provide free labor to the plantation complexes of the new world, whose primary products—coffee, sugar, tobacco—were needed to satiate the culture of taste and the civilizing process.5 In this triangle, African bodies mediated the complex relations between slave traders like Troxxilla, colonial governors such as Beck, and the unnamed but powerful directors of the Amsterdam Chamber of Commerce.

  Here, then, are the startling contrasts that will initiate my meditation on the relation between slavery and the culture of taste: on one hand, we have the work of art endowing aura to some of the humblest subjects in a modern polity; on the other hand, we have these same people reduced to mere objects of trade. Like the other great works of the major Baroque painters of the period—Diego Velasquez and Peter Paul Rubens, for example—Rembrandt's painting was unique for placing Africans at the center of the frame of the picture and not confining them to borders as was the case in the worlds of an earlier generation of European court painters, including Anthony van Dyck's portrait paintings.6 But the recognition of the African as a figure worthy of representation in painting was often at odds with the perception of Africans as objects of trade, the primary conception that was making its way into the prosaic discourse of the time, often in the form of official correspondence, decrees, or so-called accurate accounts of Guinea. In the prose of the period, the slaves who had become the cog around which trade and social relationships revolved were conceived as mute and invisible objects, available to their interlocutors only as synecdoche, parts standing for the whole, subject to monetary additions and deductions, valued solely in terms of guilders, or, in the English case, guineas.

  On the surface, Troxxilla and the members of the Amsterdam Chamber of Commerce may not seem to have anything to do with the works of one of the most distinguished painters from the Low Countries in the Baroque period. And for modern connoisseurs of art, Troxxilla's almost impersonal and quotidian prose of trade, notaries, and contracts seems so far removed from Rembrandt's painting that it is hard to believe that the two were produced in the same culture, in the same city, in the same year. And yet, in spite of the powerful moral geography that separates them, these cultural texts were united by their physical and cultural proximity. They represent the two sides of our modern identity. Indeed, the now barely visible connection between matters of art and taste and the political economy of slavery generates the questions that inform this chapter and this book as a whole: What was the relation between aesthetic objects and the political economy of slavery? How could such elevated images of art exist in the same realm as the harsh world of enslavement and the slave trade? How could the figure of the black simultaneously be the source of what Walter Benjamin aptly called “aura” and a prosaic object in a discourse of commodity fetishism?7 And how do we read these two spheres of social life—one rooted in the realm of the aesthetic, civility, and taste, and the other in the political economy of slavery—in the same register? This introductory chapter explores the cultural, historical, and aesthetic context in which these questions emerged and why they continue to haunt the narrative of modern identity.

  2

  Within the culture of modernity, slavery always appears to be anachronistic. This anachronism arises from the fact that the terms in which the culture of modernity defined itself—and has hence been defined—seemed at odds with all that enslavement entails. Modern identity was premised on the supremacy of a self functioning within a social sphere defined by humane values; indeed, the distinctiveness of this moment in the history of the Western world has been predicated on the existence of free and self-reflective subjects, not bodies in bondage. And while there are disagreements on what constituted modernity and what its key integers were, and while there are still unresolved disputes about the origins, history, and consequences of a modern identity, all major documents on the Enlightenment and its aftermath have been premised on the idea of what Marcel Mauss and others have termed “the category of the person.”8 Whether we approach the issue from the perspective of the German Enlightenment (Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant) or the British tradition associated with the Scottish Enlightenment (David Hume, Lord Kames, and Adam Smith), the culture of modernity was envisioned across Europe as the moment of liberation of the subject from the dictates of tradition, religion, and old rules of conduct.9 In its simplest form, the project of Enlightenment, considered to be the high point of modernity, was conceived as the production and valorization of the subject as autonomous, self-reflective, and unencumbered by immediate experience.

  Within the European continental tradition, the production of a unique and self-reflective human subject was closely aligned with the project of rationality and the autonomy of aesthetic judgment. Modern subjects were those individuals who were capable of using their faculties of reason and judgment in the conduct of human affairs; the individual was the sole arbiter of meaning and identity, not a cog in a system of institutional and institutionalized rules and behaviors. This, of course, was the claim made at the beginning of Immanuel Kant's 1784 essay, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”

  Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding! For enlightenment of this kind, all that is needed is freedom. And the freedom in question is the most innocuous form of all—freedom to make public use of one's reason in all matters.10

  Within the series of debates and disputes that came to define the European Enlightenment, reason and the subject's capacity for rationality were paramount. The idea of Enlightenment was premised
on a fundamental belief “in the power of human reason to change society and liberate the individual from the restraints of custom or arbitrary authority; all backed up by a world view increasingly validated by science rather than by religion or tradition.”11 The ambition of the Enlightenment, then, was to understand human life through what Kant considered to be a priori principles or ideas of reason, now separated from the event as a sensual or phenomenological experience. All that was needed for enlightened self-understanding was the most innocuous form of freedom: the “freedom to make public use of one's reason in all matters.”12 And if Kant's little document is considered to represent a major milestone in the story of European modernity, it is because of its precise isolation of the two issues that would provide the fulcrum for a modern identity—the question of freedom and rationality.

  That the mass of African slaves who drove the European economies of the time were not free was not a matter that bothered Kant or his British interlocutors, such as David Hume, because the black was excluded from the domain of modern reason, aesthetic judgment, and the culture of taste. Kant and Hume, often considered to be rivals in the battle to define the contours of reason and taste, would still find concurrence when it came to the question of an alleged black inferiority, either in morals or rationality. Kant asserted this concurrence of opinion in his complimentary use of Hume as a source in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime: