But what is even more intriguing here is that Williams's story, read as a successful or failed experiment in the education of the African, could easily move from the domain of plantation politics to Enlightenment Scotland and back without being transformed by the modes of intellectual reflection one would expect from the best minds of the time. The involvement of Long, a distinguished member of the slave-owning class in Jamaica, in this debate should not be considered to be a minor episode in the history of the aesthetic ideology. Long is important to the debate on the aesthetic and the ordering of the arts in the modern period because he was forced, often by political expedience, to make a clear connection between questions of morality, artistic genius, and the economic interests of the slave-owning class. It was Long who gave substance to Hume's conjecture, and he did so from the perspective of one who saw black subjects as a phenomenological rather than abstract threat to Western notions of morality and selfhood.
Long's racism was grounded in what he considered to be undisputed facts; this was the basis of his authority and of the shadow he was to cast over the whole project of theorizing difference in the modern period. Far from moving from the mainstream of a “broader cultural milieu” to a “more eccentric outpost,” as Warhman has suggested, Long was indeed constituting a new economy of debate in which the debasement of the black was the signal of a particular way of speaking about modern identity.30 Long's views were certainly extreme even by the standards of the age, but they were part of a calculated phenomenological project: the production of a black specter that would consolidate the vision of the West Indies and the image of the slave-owning class as the custodian of civilization. What Elsa Goveia once called the “pseudo Africa” of the white Creole imagination was intended to conjure up “a country of unspeakable barbarity and terror, by contrast with which the West Indies could be represented as a virtual paradise.”31
While Hume's racism has been the subject of debate and dispute, my interest here is to restate the enormous influence he had on matters of race and questions of taste in the modern period.32 His footnote was to influence serious philosophers like Kant just as it was to embolden the philosophical pretensions of West Indian planters like Long in their rearguard attempt to salvage the slaving interests in the age of abolition, or even American “liberals” like Thomas Jefferson as they tried to reconcile the ideology of Enlightenment with the necessity of enslavement. At the center of this racial project was the exclusion of blacks from the domain of art and sensibility, of both a formal and informal aesthetic. This explains why those blacks who aspired to genius and cultural achievement seemed to irritate and even threaten the project of white cultural self-fashioning in the eighteenth century more than other marginalized peoples. This irritation was most apparent in the thinking of Jefferson. John Chester Miller has noted that when Jefferson “heard of a colored person distinguishing himself or herself in the arts, science, or literature, his first question habitually was how much white ‘blood' this particular individual possessed.”33 Jefferson considered the letters of Benjamin Banneker, the self-taught black mathematician, “childish and trivial.”34 Phillis Wheatley (fig. 3.4) may well be what Henry Louis Gates has called “the mother of African-American literature,” but Jefferson did not consider her to be a true poet, asserting that the “compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”35
In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson described the black as a figure of sensation rather than reflection; he conceded that blacks were equal to whites in the area of memory but inferior in the realm of reason; crucially, he argued that “in imagination” they were “dull, tasteless, and anomalous.”36 Jefferson identified areas in which blacks excelled (they were gifted in music, for example), but their failure of imagination was the basis of skepticism, if not censure. Echoing a view expressed by Hume and Kant on the blacks' incapacity to progress even when they had been given a liberal education or “lived in countries where the arts and sciences are cultivated to a considerable degree,” Jefferson asserted that he had not found “a black [who] had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never saw even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.”37
But it is when he turned to the question of the imagination that this lack seemed most glaring:
In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved. Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately [sic]; but it could not produce a poet.…Ignatius Sancho has approached nearer to merit in composition; yet his letters do more honor to the heart than the head. They breathe the purest effusions of friendship and general philanthropy, and shew how great a degree of the latter may be compounded with strong religious zeal. He is often happy in the turn of his compliments, and his style is easy and familiar, except when he affects a Shandean fabrication of words. But his imagination is wild and extravagant, escapes incessantly from every restraint of reason and taste, and, in the course of its vagaries, leaves a tract of thought as incoherent and eccentric, as is the course of a meteor through the sky.38
Significantly, the terms that Jefferson used to exclude blacks from the realm of the imagination reflected his own mastery of the idiom of the culture of taste and the ideology of the aesthetic. He had a good sense of the distinction between instincts and reflection, of the difference between ability and cultivation in the arts, and of the line that divided the wild and extravagant imagination that he adduced to Sancho and the “restraint of reason and taste.” This was the unadulterated vocabulary of the culture of taste.
3.4 Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston, frontispiece, Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London, 1773).
Why did even the hint that blacks could be active agents in the production of art and consumption rile the enlightened men of taste? In order to answer this question, one needs to try to recover the world in which these men (and occasionally women) operated against the backdrop of the often invisible slavery that enabled the culture of consumption. One needs to provide an allegory of a world in which reason and taste, the indices of civilization and modernity, were intimately connected with the materiality of a slavery that seemed to undermine the moral geography of modern life, including the middle-class desire for cultural purity and subjective freedom. And in order to show how slavery informed and haunted the project of taste, it is necessary to clarify the theoretical categories that will guide my discussion in the rest of this chapter—repression and overdetermination.
J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis have defined repression as “an operation whereby the subject attempts to repel, or to confine to the unconscious, representations (thoughts, images, memories) which are bound to an instinct”; it occurs when “to satisfy an instinct—though likely to be pleasurable in itself—would incur the risk of provoking unpleasure because of other requirements.”39 But repression also has a looser meaning: it serves as a defense, part of a group of operations intended to reduce and eliminate “any change liable to threaten the integrity of the biopsychological individual.”40 Overdetermination is aligned to repression because it refers to the process by which certain formations of the unconscious, such as dreams and symptoms, “can be attributed to a plurality of determining factors”; the formation is shown to result from multiple causes and a “multiplicity of unconscious elements.”41 In this context, slavery and taste, though divorced through a powerful theoretical scheme that assumed that the haunting power of the former threatened the integrity of the latter, need to be recovered in their identity and difference. The rest of this chapter wil
l show how slavery and the culture of taste encountered each other in the social and moral geography of Englishness. More specifically, I will explore how slavery functioned as the great unconscious in the infrastructure of modern identity.
3
Given its overwhelming presence in the British colonies in North America and the Caribbean, the suggestion that slavery was repressed would appear to be anomalous. It was an institution that was visible on the geography of its practice and places of enactment; it was considered to be a source of honor and prestige; but it was often surrounded by a violence and shame that, as I will show later, the masters could not escape. And it was precisely because of its capacity to provoke what was unpleasurable, in both a moral and aesthetic sense, that the link between slavery and the culture of taste needed censoring mechanisms, schemes that would keep apart what was unpleasurable so that it could continue to satisfy instincts and desires that had become integral to modern culture.
Consider, for example, the role of sugar in the making of the culture of taste and economies of pleasure in general. Sugar was the commodity that sweetened the pivot of coffee around which the culture of taste revolved. Without sugar and coffee, the fashioning of categories such as politeness and the overall reconciliation between virtue and conspicuous consumption discussed in the first part of this book would not have been realized. Sugar was one of the many commodities from the reaches of empire that “entered everyday life and changed forever the domestic face of Britain itself.”42 Since the fifteenth century, sugar, as the primary source of sweetness, had come to serve as the link between Europe and its colonies, with “the passage of centuries only underlining its importance even while politics changed.”43 Changing sugar fortunes were intricately connected to the private and public roles of leading men of taste such as Christopher Codrington and William Beckford. Sugar also defined the meaning of taste and consumption; as an object of pleasure it was one visible example of how a colonial economy was built on slaveholding and domestic Englishness. And sugar was not just “the engine for the transformation of British overseas trade,” to use James Walvin's term; it was also located at the nexus between private pleasure and public power. Sugar “became established in European taste preferences at a time when European power, military might, and economic initiative were transforming the world.”44
And since the institution of slavery was shaped by the production of the commodity, sugar provided the vital and inescapable link between white consumption and black labor. The demand for sugar in Britain led to the expansion of West Indian plantations and a rise in imported African labor.45 Sugar could not be produced without massive imports of cheap labor: “Every stage of the sugar making process required strenuous labor, close supervision, and careful timing.”46 And only the African slave could be conscripted into a regimen that is now remembered for its brutality. In fact, the production of sugar—plus tobacco and cotton in North America—has been identified as the single most important catalyst for the African slave trade. In Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams, the pioneer Caribbean historian and nationalist, argued that black slavery had nothing to do with race or climate; on the contrary, its existence could be expressed in “three words: in the Caribbean, Sugar; on the mainland, Tobacco and Cotton.”47 By the end of the seventeenth century, notes Angus Calder, “King Sugar would have unchallenged reign over the island colonies.”48 Sugar and slavery developed hand in hand, “two faces of a single phenomenon,” adds Dunn.49 In effect, the counterpoint to the European coffeehouse was the Caribbean sugar complex, the growing, processing, and export of this commodity enabled by African slaves.
But my interest here is not the generalized debate on the connection between the demand for sugar and the rise of West Indian slavery; rather, I am interested in elaborating a direct connection between the slave regime and the construction of a culture of taste in England. As I noted in the introductory chapter, it was difficult for an individual to belong to the culture of taste without money and status. While it is true that the culture of taste could enable social mobility, the production and consumption of beautiful objects needed moneyed patrons. And at a time when the patronage of art and culture had shifted from the courts and aristocracy to the middle classes, the only people with amounts of money large enough to patronize the institutions of cultural production were colonial barons, those who had made their money in slavery and related colonial enterprises. Indeed, from the end of the seventeenth century until the end of the slave trade at the beginning of the nineteenth, the richest members of the British ruling class were those with economic interests in the slave plantations of North America and the Caribbean or economic interests in India and the East. But without question, sugar dominated the political economy of the eighteenth century, prompting Adam Smith to note that the tobacco colonies did not send “such wealthy planters as we see frequently arrive from the sugar islands.”50
American historian Lowell Joseph Ragatz well described the hegemony of sugar in the opening lines of his classic 1929 study, The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763–1833: “The sugar planters were the conspicuously rich men of Great Britain in the middle of the seventeen hundreds. ‘As wealthy as a West Indian’ was proverbial.”51 This point was echoed by Angus Calder almost fifty years later: “The major absentee families—Long, Codrington, Lascelles, above all Beckford—were among the wealthiest in England.”52 The great slaveholding families were not adventurous like early modern buccaneers; on the contrary, they were seen as modernizers who had the capacity to transform the grammar of everyday life, to manipulate markets, to place property at the center of the meaning of value, and often, to shape the nature of the law through their influence in Parliament. Slaveholders were the major patrons of the culture of taste in their times; without the massive profits made in sugar production in the Caribbean, conspicuous consumption could not have been possible.
Such connections were not always visible. Although British consumers certainly knew that sugar was produced by slaves in the West Indies, they operated in a world in which a discursive or conceptual gap separated the leisure of drinking coffee or tea from the brutality of slavery. In this sense slavery enabled the culture of taste because it provided the structures and institutions that made it possible, but its presence was non-visible. To put it another way, it is unlikely that people enjoying a cup of coffee in an English coffeehouse or a cup of tea at home would make a direct link between such pleasurable activities and the suffering of slaves in a West Indian plantation. On the level of culture and consumption, it seemed that slavery functioned as the absent cause of modern Englishness. On the level of trade and politics, however, slavery was the source of power and prestige in the realm, the foundation of new presentations of the self in the public sphere.
We are now so used to thinking about English slavery from the vantage point of its abolition and the humanitarian discourse surrounding it that we have forgotten that at one point to oppose slavery was considered un-English and unpatriotic. As Eric Williams argued powerfully in the second chapter of Capitalism and Slavery, from Quakers to cardinals and admirals, supporting the slave trade was at one point expected of every true English man and woman. There was a time when William Wilberforce, the abolitionist, was the most hated man in England, his cause considered to be anti-English. Lord Nelson, the hero of Trafalgar, couched his disdain for the abolitionists in the language of patriotism: “I was bred in the good old school, and taught to appreciate the value of our West Indian possessions, and neither in the field nor the Senate shall their just rights be infringed, while I have an arm to fight in their defence, or a tongue to launch my voice against the damnable doctrine of Wilberforce and his hypocritical allies.”53
If Nelson was irritated by abolitionists, it is because the true, unsung heroes and patriots of England in the eighteenth century were slave traders, men like Thomas Golightly, owner of a slaving ship and the mayor of Liverpool, a city built on slave money. On February 14, 1788, Goligh
tly and the slaving interest in Liverpool sent a petition to the House of Commons calling attention to the threat that abolitionism posed to British commerce. The petition is worth quoting in detail, because it illustrates how central slave trading had become to the identity of nation and empire:
To the honourable the House of Commons, the humble petition of the Mayor, showeth that the trade of Liverpool having met with the countenance of this honourable House in many Acts of Parliament, which have been granted at different times during the present century, for the constructing of proper and convenient wet docks for shipping, and more especially for the African ships, which from their form require to be constantly afloat, your Petitioners have been emboldened to lay out considerable sums of money and to pledge their Corporates seal for other sums to a very large amount for effectuating these goods and laudable purposes.
That your petitioners have also been happy to see the great increase and different resources of trade which has flowed in upon their town by the numerous canals and other communications from the interior parts of this kingdom, in which many individuals, as well as public bodies of proprietors are materially interested. And that from these causes, particularly the convenience of the docks, and some other local advantages, added to the enterprising spirit of the people, which has enabled them to carry on the African Slave Trade with vigour, the town of Liverpool has arrived at a pitch of mercantile consequence which cannot but affect and improve the wealth and prosperity of the kingdom at large.
Your Petitioners therefore contemplate with real concern the attempts now making by the petitions lately preferred to your honourable House to obtain a total abolition of the African Slave Trade, which has hitherto received the sanction of Parliament, and for a long series of years has constituted and still continues to form a very extensive branch of the commerce of Liverpool, and in effect gives strength and energy to the whole; but confiding in the wisdom and justice of the British Senate, your Petitioners humbly pray to be heard by their counsel against the abolition of this source of wealth before the Honourable House shall proceed to determine upon a point which so essentially concerns the welfare of the town and port of Liverpool in Particular, and the landed interest of the kingdom in general and which in their judgment must also tend to the prejudice of the British manufacturers, must ruin the property of the English merchants in the West Indies, diminish the public revenue and impair the maritime strength of Great Britain.54
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