Slavery and the Culture of Taste

by Gikandi, Simon;

  That a powerful racial ideology was central to the theories and practices of modernity is not in doubt. The journey to modernity, whether from its imagined barbarism in the Middle Ages or to its high point in the eighteenth century, was conceived as the passage from an era that was impervious to difference to one in which difference was essential to the maintenance of identity. From Cervantes's Don Quixote to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, the foundational narrative of modernity was the coming into being, or self-awareness, of a European self in relation to the other—the Moor, the Indian, or the savage. Difference was, of course, always an important part of Western identity, but it was in the modern period that it became essential to its core set of values.160 Even where a moral economy of difference was not dramatized as the condition of possibility of European identity, a sense of separation from other forms of meaning—be they secular or divine—characterized what Louis Dupre has called the passage to modernity, the removal of transcendence from structures of meaning and its replacement by a structure of separation:

  Whereas previously meaning had been established in the very act of creation by a wise God, it now fell upon the human mind to interpret a cosmos, the structure of which had ceased to be given as intelligible. Instead of being an integral part of the cosmos, the person became its source of meaning. Mental life separated from cosmic being: as meaning-giving “subject,” the mind became the spiritual substratum of all reality. Only what it objectively constituted would count as real. Thus reality split into two separate spheres: that of the mind, which contained all intellectual determinations, and that of all other being, which received them.161

  In the cultures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this split could be secularized and radicalized so that the discourse of Enlightenment, in spite of the universalism that has drawn the ire of philosophers of difference, depended on powerful binary oppositions for its maintenance. During this period, what had started as a system of classifying nature in the works of William Petty and Carl Linnaeus would coalesce into concepts of human difference explained by environmental, evolutionary, and developmental theories. And the need to justify or oppose slavery would lead to the racialization of difference in unprecedented ways. Indeed, one of the great ironies of the age of enlightenment is that it was in the later phase of the eighteenth century, when slavery was under attack by abolitionists and others, that racial economies seemed to circulate with the greatest vigor and venom.162 But what appears most startling is that the more theories of modernity evolved in order to account for the unique identity of Europe, the more they needed the black to function as the pathological figure that would serve as a counterpoint to beauty, taste, and civic virtue. As Sander Gilman has noted, when writers in the age of Enlightenment turned to “speculations concerning basic principles of art, the function of such figures in theoretical contexts provided a clue to the comprehension of the exotic as well as of the specific role of the Black in eighteenth-century thought.”163

  Nowhere was the necessity of the black as the counterpoint to white visuality more marked than in debates on the physical and physiological nature of perception, a question central to eighteenth-century reflections on the distinction between what Gilman calls “acquired and innate responses to perceptual categories”: was our sense of perceptual categories such as size, perspective, and color innate in ourselves as human beings or acquired through our education or formed habits?164 Responses to and debates about this question came to revolve around the report of an experiment carried out by Dr. William Cheselden, one of the most distinguished anatomists of the age, at St. Thomas's Hospital in London. Cheselden had carried out an operation on a boy with impaired sight and reported the transformations in his patient's conception of colors. Cheselden reported that after the operation the patient was forced to rethink his previously faint notion of colors: “Now Scarlet he thought the most beautiful of all Colours, and the others the most gay were the most pleasing, whereas the first time he saw Black, it gave him Uneasiness, yet after a little Time he was reconcil'd to it; but some Months after, seeing by Accident a Negroe Woman, he was struck with great Horror at the Sight.”165

  Cheselden's conclusion was that that since the boy had never seen a black woman before, and had hence not acquired the ability to associate blackness with ugliness through culture and instruction, his terror was immediate and intuitive; his fear of blackness was physiological, not social. In other words, on their opening, the boy's eyes had made an immediate, unmediated association of blackness with a set of negative values not acquired through social association. Cheselden's experiment had led Burke to conclude that blackness and darkness were made painful by “their natural operation, independent of any associations whatsoever”:

  The horror, in this case, can scarcely be supposed to arise from any association. The boy appears by the account to have been particularly observing, and sensible for one of his age: and therefore, it is probable, if the great uneasiness he felt at the first sight of black had arisen from its connexion with any other disagreeable ideas, he would have observed and mentioned it. For an idea, disagreeable only by association, has the cause of its ill effect on the passions evident enough at the first impression; in ordinary cases, it is indeed frequently lost; but this is, because the original association was made very early, and the consequent impression repeated often. In our instance, there was no time for such an habit; and there is no reason to think, that the ill effects of black on his imagination were more owing to its connexion with any disagreeable ideas, than that the good effects of more cheerful colours were derived from their connexion with pleasing ones. They had both probably their effects from their natural operation.166

  In Burke's view, blackness terrified us not simply because we had been taught to fear it, but because our dread of darkness had a physiological source—it caused tension in the muscles of the eye and this, in turn, generated terror. For Burke and many of his contemporaries, it was precisely because of its innate capacity to produce terror that blackness functioned as the source of the sublime. And the sublime, as is well known, came to occupy a central role in the aesthetic ideology, as it was variously associated with the ethical discourse of the Enlightenment and with revolutionary terror.167

  Radical theories of racial difference now tend to be adduced to the end of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century, and economies of difference in the period are posited as diverse and malleable, but the new readings of alterity continuously struggle to reconcile the larger moral economies of differences with the more specific racialized forms that stand out at the end of the century. Roxanna Wheeler, for example, has argued that “throughout the eighteenth century older conceptions of Christianity, civility, and rank were more explicitly important to Britons' assessment of themselves and other people than physical attributes such as skin color, shape of the nose, or texture of the hair.”168 She has further asserted that other marks of rank, such as dress, manners, and language, constituted more visible forms of difference and that developmental, so-called four-stage theories of human development, “arguably offered a more significant form of racialization of the body politic than the categories concerning the physical body found in natural history.”169

  But my overall focus on the role of blackness in the negative dialectic of modernity departs from this diffuseness of difference, or, rather, its pluralization. Models developed within philosophy or natural history would, of course, be more nuanced than the images of black difference that circulated in the common culture, but this does not make them more compelling for two particular reasons that are central to my project. First, the power of visual images—what has come to be known as “the scopic regime” of modernity—cannot be underestimated.170 From early modern notions of perspective to the retinal images that Descartes put at the center of his philosophy of mind, the visual was the dominant model of representation in the reimagination of a modern identity, and this has led scholars of theories of the mind, the imaginary, and epistemology
to conclude that modernity was “resolutely ocularcentric” and to identify the “ubiquity of vision as the master sense of the modern era.”171

  Second, explored in purely visual terms, the image of the black would retain surprising consistency, thus challenging the ideas of immutable difference noted earlier. Here, the issue is not whether images of blacks in the European regimen of representation were positive or negative; rather, across the whole spectrum of modernity, from the early modern period to the era of high imperialism, from the European courts to the streets and coffeehouses of the modern period, the black stood out because of his or her color. It was color that made black difference visible, either in a demonic or benign fashion. In fact, in the few instances when they sought to overcome the logic of difference, European commentators and engravers of African scenes strove to find a way around blackness altogether and present the African in a “white face” thereby deploying analogy to efface polarity.172 The preference of analogy over polarity was particularly marked in the early modern period when Europeans sought to convert Africans and thus sought paradigms that would efface difference. Many Italian or Portuguese accounts of African social and political institutions from the end of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth assumed that black polities and principalities were not different from European ones and hence did not shy away from the superimposition of African experiences with European ideographs.173 Looking at Theodore de Bry's illustrations of the dresses of Congo nobleman (fig. 1.6), for example, one can assume that the famous engravers did not make any distinction between Africans and Europeans, that blackness was not a negative or remarked feature in their imagination of the other.174 Alternatively, one could argue that African subjects, cultures, and customs could only be communicated through European models or masks.

  The De Brys did not, of course, set foot in Africa, and their illustrations were based on the accounts of the travelers whose works they were engraving, but one can assume that what was foremost in the minds of both writers and illustrators was the task of assimilating Africa to fit into European ideals of social class, cultural practices, and behavior. Here, the work of conversion or cultural translation was predicated on both the recognition of difference and its transcendence. For, as Vicente Rafael has observed in a different context, translation “involves not simply the ability to speak in a language other than one's own but the capacity to reshape one's thoughts and actions in accordance with accepted forms.”175 Premised on the need “to submit to the conventions of a given social order,” translation becomes “a matter of first discerning the differences between and within social codes and then of seeing the possibility of getting across those differences.”176

  Still, the discourse of similitude was always marginal and ephemeral. The causes of this ephemerality were the political, cultural, and legal demands of slavery, especially in the Americas. The political and moral economy of slavery mandated the separation of the black and white, even in similar conditions of servitude, as was the case in colonial Virginia, and the isolation of the African from what was considered human under law and convention. Racial attitudes and imagery may have hardened at the end of the eighteenth century, but no one doubts that they had been there at the beginning of the modern period. Similarly, it is difficult to conceive of modern slavery without its manifest racism. This racism had a paradigmatic, syntagmatic, and pragmatic value. The paradigmatic axis was one of negation and dissociation: blackness served a useful purpose in the modern social imaginary because it represented the spectrum against which whiteness was imagined. Blackness also helped nurture what Winthrop Jordan has called a “novel relativism”; the color of the African “was to remain for centuries what it had been from the first, a standing problem for natural philosophers.”177 The whiteness of Queen Elizabeth's alabaster bosom was often measured against the color of the “blackmoores,” who, though threatening to contaminate the realm, could still find a place as pendants on her earrings and at the top of the family crest of John Hawkins, her slave trader.178 Whether elevated or demonized in the European imagination, “it was the African's color of skin that became his defining characteristic, and aroused the deepest response in Europeans.”179 Even William Blake, an opponent of slavery in good standing, couldn't imagine Africans having an identity outside their color (fig. 1.7)

  1.6 Johan Theodore and Johan Israel de Bry, Dress of the Noblemen and Commonalty of Kongo. From Thomas Astley, ed., A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1745-1747), vol. 3, plate xv, facing p. 248.

  The visual visibility of blacks does not imply that they were the only others considered outside the norm of the human and thus essentially fated for slavery. On the contrary, scholars of slavery have noted how, in the Americas especially, Native Americans were imagined and processed to provide the first paradigm for difference as a precondition for domination.180 From the mines of Peru to the farms of North America, native peoples were the first to be included in the economy of bondage. And yet the enslavement of Native Americans was rarely justified through the invocation of their color, for while Europeans and white Americans held “a deep prejudice against almost all aspects of Indian culture,” they did not have a strong bias “against Indian color, shape, or features; the American native was socially deplorable but physically admirable.”181 The distinction between culture and color would have important consequences both for debates about the notions of taste and for the presence of slavery in domains that prided themselves for their innate capacity for freedom.

  One way that advocates of the Enlightenment and the culture of taste in the Americans could rationalize slavery, for example, was to insist on the alienness of the African, as denoted by color, in the geography of the new world. Like other members of the Virginia aristocracy, to cite one famous example, Thomas Jefferson considered Native Americans to be similar to whites; they were essentially the same people “and the differences between them were superficial, the effects of environment rather than biology.”182 In contrast, Jefferson would often reflect on the meaning of the black skin and the deficits associated with it, seeking to establish a scientific and rational explanation for the syntagmatic that was also the stigmata:

  The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?183

  Jefferson would go on to a make a direct analogy between the civilizational abilities of native Americans, or at least their potential for membership in the kingdom of culture and the realm of taste, and black cultural incapacity:

  1.7 William Blake, Europe Supported by Africa and America. 1796. Engraving. From John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. Copy in Princeton University Library.

  The Indians, with no advantages of this kind, will often carve figures on their pipes not destitute of design and merit. They will crayon out an animal, a plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation. They astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory; such as prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated. But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.184

  One could argue, of course, that the development of a racial imaginary, especially one predicated on color difference
s, was driven by the pragmatic need to establish moral and legal boundaries between white servants and black slaves in the American colonies. But as I will show in the next three chapters, even when the political economy of slavery presupposed racism or used it as a form of rationalization, it still demanded a relentless racial logic and a sensorium predicated on blackness as a form of disgust. For some leading cultural citizens of Virginia, blacks as a race were considered to be, in the words of Arthur Lee, “the most detestable and vile that ever the earth produced.”185 This was a view echoed by Edward Long in the History of Jamaica, which I will return to in later chapters.186

  Theories of race and racism were shifting throughout the modern period, and it may well be the case that by the end of the eighteenth century, hard-core racist thinking had moved from the broader cultural sphere to what Wahrman has termed “eccentric outposts.”187 But whether we are dealing with the belated attempt by agents of the slave trade—the Liverpool interest, for example—to deploy the specter of race to justify their profits; or the abolitionists' imposition of a pathos of suffering on the black body, as was evident in Josiah Wedgwood's famous medallion for the committee on the abolition of the slave trade; or Blake's attempts to imagine the African woman in the comity of nations, racialization seems to have increased rather than diminished at the end of the eighteenth century. The aura of blackness seemed inescapable.

  Intersections:

  Taste, Slavery, and the Modern Self

  Judging from the entry she made in her diary, Monday, April 24, 1797, was a very good day for Anna Margaretta Larpent (fig. 2.1), a theater critic and woman of taste. On that particular day, Larpent rose up early and, after prayer, attended to some family business, including hemming and mending a handkerchief for her son George; she then read Claude Carloman de Rulhièr's Histoire ou Anecdotes sur La Révolution de Russie; en l'Année 1762. She would spend the rest of the day visiting or corresponding with friends, attending to other domestic matters, and doing some reading. We know that reading was an important part of Larpent's life, because a marked feature of her diary entry for Monday, April 24, 1797, as for other days, was the summary of the texts she had read, often presented as the culminating act of what was supposed to be an ordinary day. Indeed, a good portion of her entry for April 24 was devoted to reflections on Rulhier's book, calling attention to the anecdotes that had bemused her most, including “among others the meeting between Biren and Munich when Peter the Great recalled them and ordered them to drink together.”1