Slavery and the Culture of Taste

by Gikandi, Simon;

  But as James Walvin has noted, black slaves in Britain “did not occupy the crucial economic role created for them in the slave colonies” and they were not subject to the regimes of brutality and terror that created the chasm between art and enslavement that was a marked feature of the American colonies.100 From a visual and existential perspective, this situation would be startling. Where one would expect slaves to be subjects in chains or bolts, under spatial constraint, or even functioning under a brutal regimen of labor, slaves in England were often considered to be “a popular and prestigious acquisition as domestic servants,” often working in households at the highest levels of society, including that of Lord Chief Justice Mansfield.101 The existence of slavery in absentia would make it difficult to conceptualize or represent slaves as a visual and palpable ingredient of British society, but as I will show in subsequent chapters, slavery was part of the political unconscious of Britishness.102

  Paradox 4: African Slavery and English Freedom

  There is, of course, a glaring gap between the reality of slavery and the ideals of English freedom, and the fact that they were products of the same moment is one of the initial questions that prompted this study. For it is indeed ironic that the growth of the African slave trade was taking place at a time when “the institutions of bondage” had all but disappeared from English society; slavery became part of the economic mandate of Englishness in a period when the unique identity of England was premised on ideals of unquestioned freedom and an assumption, shared even by slave traders themselves, that “slavery was the worst of human conditions.”103 As Walvin has observed, the West Indian empires, the source of much of the wealth and prestige that was concordant with the culture of taste, were established in the period that “saw the assertion of important political and human rights” in England:

  As more and more Englishmen came to pride themselves on their newly won rights, at precisely that time Englishmen constructed a fabric of colonial slave society which was specifically designed to relegate the black below the level of humanity. Furthermore, because of the economic and political ties between metropolis and colonies, the two systems of law—English and colonial—often overlapped and frequently clashed. Nowhere was this more apparent than on the question of slavery. On the face of it the chattel status of imported slaves was at variance with the spirit and even the letter of English law. It was this problem which was to tax English courts until the early nineteenth century.104

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  My overall approach to the subject of slavery in a culture of taste will revolve around these four paradoxes. One of the arguments that I will be developing in this book, especially in the first half, is that although African slavery was rarely taken up as a central issue in the discourse of taste, it did not constitute what Michel Foucault would call “a fundamental prohibition”; on the contrary, enslavement was the “disquieting enigma” in the culture of sensibility.105 Conversely, as I argue in the second half of the book, although slaves rarely engaged directly with the debates and practices about sense and sensibility and appear impervious to the questions about taste taking place in British drawing rooms, their modes of cultural behavior were crafted and elaborated under the shadow of the domain of taste, from which they had been excluded. Like women and the poor in England, the slave—and slavery itself—was confined to a shadow existence on the margins of the discourse of cultured subjects, but it is within these margins that we must recover the power of negativity.

  In fact, it is when we think about the power of negativity that we can properly recognize the interstices in which the discourse of modern identity itself emerged. A culture of taste had no choice but to acknowledge the powerful, inevitable, and inescapable connection between culture and commerce, but it also needed to hold on to an idea of culture that was not subordinated to the forces of production. To use Marx's parlance, advocates of taste wanted culture to be both a base and a superstructure, to connect with existing forms of social production but also maintain their idealism.106 But the high priests of taste ended up with a floating signifier—a “middle term whose status is indeterminate and difficult to define.”107 For in the double interstices, or the dialect of commerce and taste, the idea of culture first had to be extricated from commerce, be purified of its social residues, and then be reinstituted as the informing value.

  My goal in this book is not to rewrite the cultural history of modern Europe or even to reconfigure the relation between centers and margins; rather, I am trying to make the case, in a narrower but specific sense, for slavery as one of the informing conditions of modern identity. But I also want to call attention to what it meant for slavery itself to be transformed into a modern category. And in order to sustain this argument, I need to establish the structural relationship between enslavement and forms of social identity, both ancient and modern. A good starting point here is to acknowledge that slavery was not a new development in the European imagination, or human society for that matter, nor was it an anachronistic development in the so-called civilizing process. As Christopher Miller has observed in his study of the literature and culture of the slave trade in the Francophone world, slavery and the slave trade are not synonymous, but they are part of a powerful dialectic: “There could be no slave trade without slavery, yet slavery continued after the slave trade…the two institutions were inseparable, since each fed and perpetuated the other.”108

  For cultural purists, a concern with slavery and taste would appear to be far-fetched since, as I will show in the next chapter, the abjection of the former always appeared to negate the ideals and claims of the latter. Indeed, given the investment modern society has made in the ideal of cultural purity, slavery could appear to be the greatest danger and threat to the self-understanding of the modern subject as civil and virtuous.109 This explains why in what were considered to be isolated centers of white civilization, such as the cities of the antebellum South, culture needed to be symbolically quarantined from African slaves, who were associated with dirt and defilement. Here, slaves were considered to be categories of persons who embodied abstract ideas about impurity and contamination; in the slave plantations of the Americas, slaves were associated with a noxious order, one that had the capacity to defile civilized subjects.110

  But to understand ritual contamination, it is important to probe the sources and uses of this terminology. We need to know, in the words of Mary Douglas, “who is issuing accusations of defilement and who is the accused,” for unless “we can trace which categories of social life are being kept apart, how they are ranked and who is being excluded, the usual analysis of defilement is blocked.”111 In this instance, we must remember that although slavery and the civilizing process were separated on the symbolic level, they were powerfully connected in the everyday world of modern life. Furthermore, as an institution, slavery had always been part of how cultures understood and defined their understanding and conceptualization of civilization. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that in many human societies, in all geographical areas of the world, there has been an intimate connection between a sense of cultural achievement and superiority and the practice of domination.

  As an institution, slavery has often been associated with cultural capital. Moses Finley, the distinguished classicist, once noted that “there was no action or belief or institution in Graeco-Roman antiquity that was not one way or other affected by the possibility that someone involved might be a slave.”112 And in his exploration of ideas of slavery from Aristotle to Augustine, Peter Garnsey observed that although slavery was perhaps not a “universal or typical labor system” in the Mediterranean world, “it can hardly be dismissed as marginal, if it was embedded in the society and economy of Athens, the creator of a rich and advanced political culture, and of Rome, the most successful empire-builder the world had thus far known.”113 The West Indian and antebellum aristocracy invested heavily in developing fences to quarantine white civilization from what was considered African barbarism, but they could not
avoid rehearsing and reaffirming the claim that there was an innate connection between slaveholding and cultural achievement. Often the cultural status and intellectual lineage of the British and American planter classes depended on their claim that the enslavement of Africans gave slaveholders the authority and gravitas of antiquity. For example, George Frederick Holmes, the son of a British planter and official in Demerara, educated at England's Durham University, was considered “the most brilliant and creative of the proslavery school,” and, like his peers, he drew on Aristotle's ideas on natural slavery to justify the institution of bondage in the American South.114 The people whom Garnsey has described as “the proslave theorists of the old south” embraced ancient Athens and Rome “as the standard-bearers of classical civilization and understandably called them up in support of their cause, along with the Biblical slaveowning societies of ancient Israel and early Christianity.”115 In his Sociology for the South, first published in 1854, George Fitzhugh would claim that domestic slavery had “produced the same results in elevating the character of the master that it did in Greece and Rome”; he compared the nobility of leading Southern aristocrats like George Washington and John Calhoun to that of Greek and Roman senators, insisting that both had been ennobled by slaveholdings.116

  During the debates on the future of slavery in the United States in the 1830s, an anonymous Southern clergyman provided the most succinct connection between slavery and civilization, arguing that the institution of slavery “ever has been and ever will be the only sure foundation of all republican governments.”117 The clergyman had a point: ancient civilizations assumed that slavery was a key fulcrum in communal organization, part of an elaborate political and symbolic economy, and the authorizing agent of claims to cultural superiority. In addition to Greece and Rome, slavery was one of the major sources of political and cultural capital in the Middle East, Africa, India, and China. In sub-Saharan Africa, undoubtedly the major casualty of modern slavery, the rise of the great kingdoms of the Sahel—Mali, Ghana, and Songhai—depended on the control of the lucrative slave routes of the region. Great empire builders and cultural heroes of African resistance to colonialism, such as Samouri Toure, are still remembered in West Africa as slave raiders.118

  There were, of course, important differences between ancient and new forms of slavery, both in terms of their organizing principles and the ideas informing them, but modern slavery presented particular difficulties to European society, because it emerged in an age when legal bondage had disappeared in the cultures that were most active in the slave trade. The Atlantic slave trade thrived at a temporal juncture in which modern identity was predicated on the question of freedom and in an era when subjectivity depended on the existence of free and self-reflective subjects. As a modern institution, slavery was anachronistic simply because it seemed to be at odds with the aspirations of the age; however, it provided the economic foundation that enabled modernity.119 And yet, and perhaps because of this anachronism, slavery informed and haunted the culture of modernity in remarkable ways; its infiltration of the governing categories, from morality and the law, natural history, and even discourses on the nature of the self, was unprecedented.

  Slavery constituted the ghost or specter that would “mark the very existence of Europe,” informing but also displacing “its great unifying projects.”120 And nowhere was this informing and haunting more dramatic and vivid than in the American colonies, where slavery was so palpable, so visible, and so phenomenal that it could not be buried in an underground economy of representation. Here, where slave owners considered themselves to be subjects of freedom, where migration and settlement had often been generated by the desire for even greater freedom, the existence of others as slaves was always necessary but also disturbing. Quite often, debates on the nature of African slavery in the new world were prefaced by the necessity to affirm the distinctiveness of an English identity that had to account for its presence and prescience in zones of displacement and enslavement.

  To put it another way, the greatest anxieties about freedom were often expressed by those invested in the enslavement of others as if they, the free, might fall into the condition that sustained their lives. Thus a Maryland statute of 1639 would define the settlers of the tobacco colony as Christians who were entitled to the liberties, immunities, privileges and customs “as any naturall born subject of England.”121 In a now famous address to Oliver Cromwell, the Assembly of Barbados defined itself as a body of “Englishmen of as clear and pure extract as any” entitled to “liberty and freedom equal with the rest of our countrymen.”122 And in the 1650s, “a number of royalist sympathizers taken by the Protectorate and sold in Barbados described their situation to Parliament as slavery (and therefore, because they were English, unjust) without betraying any awareness of the condition of the Africans with whom they must have worked.”123

  Two ironies mark what I will call the negative dialectic of slavery. The first one is that the existence of slavery clarified the meaning of freedom. As the English exiles in Barbados realized, freedom could best be imagined and desired when slavery was witnessed as its radical other. The second irony was that the most virulent demands for freedom in Europe were taking place at precisely that moment in the eighteenth century when it became “imperative to reconcile the revival of slavery in modern times with various theories of human progress.”124

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  It is in response to the challenge presented by the cauldron of slavery in an age of freedom that new modes of scholarly interpretation have emerged to excavate forgotten histories and narratives of slavery and empire and to locate them at the center of European life. But what does it mean to recuperate the meaning and value of suppressed groups on the margins of the modern world system? How is the essential condition of marginalization, exclusion, and alienation retained in relation to undiminished centers? How do we read the fragmented, transient, and often deeply elusive presence of the slave, located on the margins of the world picture, acknowledging the enslaved as an indispensible source of labor, as a counterpoint to dominant ideas about society and social organization, yet recognizing that this other of modernity could perform its function only in exclusion, in absentia, and in disavowal?

  When I started work on this book, these questions were much easier to address than they are now. Slavery was absent or only minimally present in the monumental works that sought to explore modern culture during a period defined by the so-called aesthetic turn in literary and cultural studies, just as empire was absent from the dominant histories of the period. The revisionary works by Laura Brown, Felicity Nussbaum, Linda Colley, and others mentioned earlier were just entering the mainstream of social history and cultural criticism; empire was making its way into the study of Britishness, but it had not yet come to be recognized as crucial to the formation of the issues that interested historians and cultural scholars of the period, questions about money, state formation, and art. There were still elements of empire that seemed to threaten the core center of modern European identity. Imperial questions could not be avoided, but they needed to be managed, contained, or excluded. At the time, this containment and exclusion took two forms. First, slavery and the imperial condition in which it functioned were considered peripheral in the discourses that concerned themselves with the reconstruction of the moral and cultural geography of modern life. The most notorious example of this exclusion was Simon Schama's monumental book on the Dutch golden age, The Embarrassment of Riches, a work in which the most minute aspects of the Batavian temperament were scrutinized and presented without the slightest acknowledgment of how the riches that embarrassed were derived from the slave trade.125 One was troubled by the fact that neither Schama's book, nor even the great cultural histories of European culture in the modern period, nor the monumental commentaries on the Enlightenment in various parts of Europe, nor the philosophical discourses of modernity, seemed able to incorporate slavery into their grand designs.126

  There was a second register f
or excluding slavery and its ugliness from the narrative of modern identity: inherent in the so-called aesthetic turn, often posited as an alternative to cultural criticism, was a desire to recuperate the work of art as a sensual object transcending the violence and ugliness of modern life. This neo-Kantian turn to the aesthetic ideology, evident in Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just and Peter de Bolla's Art Matters, were driven by the belief that, faced with the ugliness of modern life, the self needed to turn to the sensual and pleasurable as the source of a redemptive aesthetic if not hermeneutics. In On Beauty, to use one prominent example, Scarry would locate the power of beauty in the “realm of sensation” and connect it to the “sacred” and “unprecedented”; the beautiful would thus be endowed with a deep auratic sense and powerful cognitive capacity: “The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction—to locate what is true. Both in the account that assumes the existence of the immortal realm and in the account that assumes the nonexistence of the immortal realm, beauty is a starting place for education.”127 In Art Matters, de Bolla, whose previous book The Discourse of the Sublime had been a powerful accounting of the history of the modern subject, would now invoke the power of the aesthetic experience and locate it solidly in what he called a “poetics of wonderment” that was made distinct from “other forms of experience” through its “absolute divorce from the ordinary or everyday.”128 Yet, as my opening juxtaposition of Rembrandt's painting and Pedro Diez Troxxilla's slave receipt illustrates, the modern period was characterized by a tenuous relation between the aesthetic object and lived experience. How could Rembrandt and Troxxilla, living in the same city at the same time, occupying the same habitus, engage in a different set of economies (symbolic and real) and yet not be troubled by each other's presence?