Slavery and the Culture of Taste

by Gikandi, Simon;

  The dilemma for Newton—and for many others engaged in the slave trade in the modern period—was this: slavery was supported by established law, religious beliefs, and established commercial practices, yet it seemed to demand enforcement through acts of violence that challenged the integrity of the disciplining self as much as the disciplined body. Often the main cause of the slavers' scruples was the obvious contradiction between the legality of the slave trade and the need to resort to violence in order to enforce it: if slavery was morally right, why did it demand violent rationalization, and what did the constant use of force do to the slavers' moral character?

  On the surface, captains of the slave ships were not perturbed by slavery's effects on their own moral character; they could always resort to other worldly explanations for their involvement in the trade. Captain Hugh Crow, one of the most important slave ship captains to come out of Liverpool, expressed the strong opinion that slavery was “permitted by that Providence that rules over all, as a necessary evil.”99 After all, slavery had made Liverpool one of the major centers of industry and trade, its ships cruising the seas, ferrying the cargo in human trade, its houses of trade proudly named after slave ports. One of its major warehouses was proudly named Goree, after the infamous Senegalese slave port. It made sense for the men who had made fortunes in the slave trade to justify it by invoking providence, but this continuous invocation of a higher power to rationalize slavery seemed driven by the sense that questions of law and profit were not enough justifications for the destruction and death that the slavers had to deal with every day.

  It was impossible for slavers to escape the death and violence that was attendant to their trade. To say that violence and death are the primary topics in the logs of slave captains, from William Snelgrave to Samuel Gamble, is not an exaggeration.100 The vocabulary of providence would thus come to mediate the double demands made on these men of taste: the imperative that that they live their lives according to the rules of civic virtue yet be good agents of commerce; that they affirm their identity as self-reflective modern subjects, yet quarantine or occlude African slaves from the domain of the human. In other words, in order to be a modern subject, the slave trader had to narrow the terms of the human.

  Thus, after two voyages in which he had interacted with his slaves at the basic level of the human or bodily, witnessing their agony at sea and handing them over to their new masters in the West Indies, Newton seemed to recognize how slavery made the terms of his own subjectivity fragile. This is Newton writing to Dr. David Jennings a few days after his second voyage:

  I have now by God's helping finished a long, troublesome and precarious voyage, with entire satisfaction to myself, my friends and my employers and am now very busy in preparing for another: for it is not in my power to command any respite.…I am more than content, in some degree thankful for my lot, which with all its inconveniences I know preferable to many millions of my fellow creatures: yet I still find myself unequal to this fluctuating way of life, where the scene is continually shifting and I am everyday engaged with some new kind of incumbrance.101

  Indeed, concerning moral questions, slavery was caught between the torsion of freedom and the necessity of commerce, and nowhere is this contradiction more manifest than in John Locke's Second Treatise on Government published in 1690. As is well known, Locke had stated that human beings were born in a state of freedom and equality and had inalienable rights to life and property:

  To understand political power aright, and derive it from its original, we must consider what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.

  A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more.102

  If slavery did not exist in the period these words were uttered, there perhaps wouldn't be any apparent contradiction between the right to property and equality. But the existence of slaves as property made Locke's first proclamation—the freedom to action and the right to dispose of one's possessions—at odds with his second claim, the existence of a state of reciprocal equality.

  Now there is a continuous debate about Locke's stance on slavery in a culture of freedom and whether he accorded equal rights to African slaves, a fact complicated by his role in the settlement and administration of the American colonies, but as far as the bona fide slaveholding class and their supporters were concerned, the ownership of slaves was part of an undisputed and inalienable right to property supported by tradition and law.103 This is the position staked out angrily by Edward Long, a Jamaican planter and lawyer, in his response to British debates on the morality of the slave trade and his objection to the Mansfield Decision of 1772:

  As our trade esteemed Negroe labourers merely a commodity, or chose in merchandize, so the parliament of Great Britain has uniformly adhered to the same idea; and hence the planters were naturally induced to frame their colony acts and customs agreeable to this, which may be termed national sense, and declared their Negroes to be fit objects of purchase and sale, transferrable like any other goods or chattels: they conceived their right of property to have and to hold, acquired by purchase, inheritance, or grant, to be as strong, just, legal, indefeasible and compleat, as that of any other British merchant over the goods in his warehouse.104

  Long's language may have been extreme, but he seemed to recognize that Africans in bondage were mere chattel—goods for sale in the marketplace. What he didn't recognize was the dialectical relationship between these “objects of slave and purchase” and the ideals of selfhood that defined the middle-class subjects of the eighteenth century. If Long had not been disingenuous, he could have acknowledged that transforming the slave into an object of trade was an important part in the process of modern self-fashioning.

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  It is significant that the slave-owning class expended a lot of energy in the process of turning the African into an object. For a woman like Nealee (assuming she survived the caravan route), the process of objectification would start the moment she stepped into the courtyard of the slave castle: she would be branded with the seal of the company that owned her, effectively fixing her fate as a commodity. While Anna Larpent and others were enjoying the expanded spaces of the London theater, concert halls, and Vauxhall Gardens, Nealee would find herself in a dungeon in the bowels of a slave castle like the female dungeon at Elmina. Here, in the eerie moment of the night, she would await the fateful morning when she would be pushed into the modern world through the infamous door of no return (fig. 2.12).

  2.12 Cape Coast Castle, Ghana, “Door of No Return.” Photograph by the author.

  Slaves, of course, responded to, or imagined, their dislocation in various ways. Olaudah Equiano recalled the first time of enslavement as “painful as it was sudden and unexpected”; he plotted it as the movement from a state of innocence and bliss to “a scene which is inexpressible by me” and inscribed it as the radical separation from a world of “familiar manners, customs and language” to one of nonrecognition.105 For Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, the story of enslavement meant radical loss to his “dear indulgent parents and relations,” the fall from “a state of innocence and freedom” to a “state of horror and slavery.”106 Even for Phillis Wheatley, who had a more eschatological view of enslavement, the journey from Africa to America denoted temporal dislocation. The movement in one of her most famous poems, “On being brought from Africa to America,” underscored the chasm between the “Pagan land” of her birth and the refined and “angelic train” that was her goal and aspiration.107 Predicated on the slaves' capacity to survive genealogical isolation, the providential design of the slave narrative would come to structure the history of the African self as a struggle with the problem of modern time. Similarly, the transformation of the slave from a figure of bondag
e to a reading or writing subject would mark the moment of arrival into the kingdom of culture and taste, which was nothing less than coming into selfhood out of bondage. This moment of arrival was marked either by the adoption of the language of sense and sensibility exemplified by the letters of Ignatius Sancho discussed in the previous chapter; by the presence of former slaves as cultured subjects in paintings by famous artists, such as Thomas Gainsborough, and their imitators; or simply by the presentation of the scene of reading as the triumph over modern time.

  Equiano, who imagined the act of reading as the key to understanding “how all things had a beginning,” was dumbfounded when the book did not talk back to him.108 And in one of the most famous examples of literacy and subjecthood, Frederick Douglass would assert that his reading of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator enabled his coming into being as a free subject: “The paper became my meat and my drink. My soul was set all on fire. Its sympathy for my brethren in bonds—its scathing denunciations of slaveholders—its faithful exposures of slavery—and its powerful attacks upon the upholders of the institution—sent a thrill of joy through my soul, such as I had never felt before!”109 But these majestic claims to a modern identity obscure the extent to which the movement of slaves through time and space was out of joint with the established temporal frames of the modern, or at least the philosophical, discourses of modernity. At a time when philosophers of modern culture were celebrating temporal rupture as the enabling condition of modernity, slaves were reacting to their own dislocation with dread. What one group saw as the necessary condition for being modern, the other conceived as a form of distortion or dislocation, the source of moral collapse and cultural terror.

  The contrasts here are significant and worthy of close reflection. For philosophers of modernity from Hegel to Habermas, modernity has been conceptualized as an “an epochal concept,” one that marks a break with a previous period and thus privileges the future as the site of fulfillment.110 In his preface to Phenomenology of the Mind, for example, Hegel would invoke his readers to see modern time as the “birth and transition to a new period,” asserting that the modern spirit had “broken with what was hitherto the world of its existence and imagination and is about to submerge all this in the past; it is at work giving itself a new form.”111 The trajectory of the modern subject, which is exemplified by the life of Anna Larpent, discussed at the opening of this chapter, could hence be read as a strategic deployment of new technologies of culture to subsume the past and create a new temporal frame for social life. Submerged in this movement of the self through time, the past had no value; everything was invested in the future as a horizon of expectations. Indeed, what Habermas has called “the differentness of the future” is what distinguishes the modern from the old world.112

  However, this was not the story of the African slave's trajectory in the temporality of modernity and the forms of social identity associated with it. On the contrary, the movement of the enslaved spirit was dominated by fear of the future, itself a symptom of an acute sense of regressive time. The slaves' notion of the future, noted an observer on the slave ship Albion-Frigate, was that of a space of death and cannibalization: “It has been observed that some slaves fancy they are being carried away to be eaten, which makes them desperate, and others are so on account of their captivity, so that if care be not taken, they will mutiny and destroy the ship's crew in hopes to get away.”113 As the ship in which he was held moved away from the African coast, Cugoano and his fellow slaves concluded that “death was now preferable than life,” and they concocted a failed plan to “burn and blow the ship, and to perish all together in the flames.”114

  These competing visions of time would find expression in the mentalities of the slave traders themselves. These were subjects who were not only at the front line of the modernizing enterprise, but those who were also constantly reminded of the arrested nature of modernity itself. Slave traders, as I have already argued, were products of a generation that had been brought up to believe in the inviolability of freedom, the authority of selfhood, and the sanctity of private property, but within the field of slavery the dialectic of freedom came face-to-face with what it thought it had exorcised from European selfhood—namely, bondage. Caught between the abstract idea of freedom and the profitable business of slave trading, slave traders did not have an appropriate grammar for describing the apparent contradiction between their cherished notions of freedom and the claims of captive bodies under law and custom, or even a proper way of accounting for the coexistence of theories of freedom and the profitable business in human chattel. In contrast, slaves did not have difficulties recognizing that the defining characteristic of their altered state was the loss of freedom across time and space.

  Consider this example: In 1721, after an aborted slave rebellion on his ship, Captain William Snelgrave demanded to know from his African slaves what had induced them to mutiny. The slaves' response, transmitted through a linguist or translator, goes to the heart of the contradiction of the politics of selfhood in the eighteenth century that concerns me in this section: “They answered, ‘I was a great Rogue to buy them, in order to carry them away from their own Country; and that they were resolved to regain their Liberty if possible.' I replied, ‘That they had forfeited their Freedom before I bought them, either by Crimes, or by being taken in War, according to the Custom of their Country; and they being now my Property, I was resolved to let them feel my Resentment, if they abused my Kindness.’”115 The slaves took one fact for granted: that their sense of self depended on their connection to natal spaces, to country, to culture, to custom. Snelgrave, on the other hand, assumed that the Africans had been acquired through a legal or customary transaction and were hence his property, not humans entitled to rights or liberty.

  More than semantics was at issue in the standoff between Snelgrave and his slave cargo, for this verbal exchange reflects the paradox of enslavement in the modern age that has been the overt subject of this chapter. In fact, what we have here is the double paradox of having slavery in the midst of a culture of freedom. The first paradox, perhaps the most obvious one, is that Snelgrave, a product of the age of sovereignty, could not recognize the slaves' desire for freedom at the most basic level. He seemed genuinely puzzled that his African captives considered themselves free subjects and put their lives in danger for the sake of a freedom that, in his mind, they had forfeited the moment they were sold. The second paradox is that despite the deployment of powerful instruments of social control and the threat of death, slaves could not be reduced to mere property; their desire for liberty, signified by acts of revolt and the capacity to talk back, was propelled by the need to assert the supremacy of human rights. It is precisely because the slaves were not commodities in the totally objective sense, subject solely to the laws of property, that rituals of punishment would become immanent to the practice of slavery. Indeed, no sooner had Snelgrave's slaves promised to be obedient than they started planning the next mutiny.

  Here we can recognize the centrality of what Kathleen Wilson has called the “ontology of identity as a coercive process” and her claim that in the imperial zones, where slavery was unique and ubiquitous, “identity was structured in part by the epistemic violence attached to the notion of human property.”116 But I want to extend this argument even further in two directions: first, to establish the close relationship between the dialectic of violence and the production of modern subjects, and, second, to explore how the process of culture or taste was underwritten by its own disciplinary, though apparently benign, structures. For if a dialectic of violence was essential to structuring the differential identity between masters as modern subjects and slaves as objects, it was because there were no natural categories defining the terms of identity. Masters and slaves did not have a common language for describing the self. In these circumstances, violence was truly ontological—it was through its bond that selfhood could be defined and redefined. The community of masters as slaves, Frederick Do
uglass realized on witnessing the beating of his aunt Hester by her owner, was initiated through a “bloody transaction.”117

  Still, it was precisely because of the contingency of the terms of identity that the invention and valorization of visible divisions became necessary. As modern subjects, slave masters understood the threat enslavement posed to their own ideas of selfhood. They thus sought to elevate the act of domination to a symbolic level, often turning punishment into what Foucault has called a “spectacle, sign, and discourse.”118 In slave ships and plantations, so-called medieval forms of punishment that had ostensibly disappeared from European courts were promoted as instruments of exorcizing the idea of freedom out of the slave. On Snelgrave's ship, after yet another failed mutiny, a slave was put through a brutal regimen of punishment for having killed a white man. The resulting scene of punishment reads like a spectacle from Foucault's Discipline and Punish:

  The Body being let down upon the Deck, the Head was cut off, and thrown overboard. This last part was done, to let our Negroes see, that all who offended thus, should be served in the same manner. For many of the Blacks believe, that if they are put to death and not dismembered, they shall return again to their own Country, after they are thrown overboard. But neither the Person that was executed, nor his Countrymen of Cormantee (as I understood afterwards), were so weak as to believe any such thing; tho' many I had on board from other Countries had that Opinion.119

  To understand the power of symbolism in this violent mode of punishment, we need to recall that for slavers, black bodies were more valuable alive than dead; they were part of an expensive cargo, and one could not be disposed of unless the stakes were extremely high. In this particular situation, other traders had reminded Snelgrave that the condemned man would have no value dead, while alive he would fetch a good price on the slave markets of the new world. However, Snelgrave resisted this argument, apparently believing that the destruction of the body of the rebellious slave took precedence over its commodity value. What necessitated this ritualization of violence and death? Why would the spectacle of punishment take precedence over the rule of property?