The transformations I have in mind here took place across many vectors. For example, the question of inequality and natural rights had to be changed or modified to enforce racial distinctions while maintaining class differences. From the early beginnings of the Virginia colony, notes Winthrop Jordan, even at a time when the working and living conditions of English yeomen and African slaves were relatively similar, “Negroes were set apart from white men by the word Negroes.”35 Set as a powerful figure of difference, the word Negro would also function as the most visible mark of social distinction, connoting debased status and “non-freedom” for those who bore it. And while this situation of debasement and nonfreedom has been explained primarily in terms of changing conditions of labor, it had an important symbolic component: the debasement of Africans was necessary to establish the difference between black slaves and English yeoman; in turn, this difference secured the latter as a distinct category in opposition to the landowning class. Deprived of liberty, “Negroes” and “Indians” entered a social structure in which their condition was fixed and there was nothing they could do to affect the overall nature of social status within colonial society. Blacks could, of course, enter the realm of Englishness through conversion or assimilation, but by the 1680s, as racism became a bedrock of colonial American culture, Africans in America were encountering a new term—white—which they could not possess or claim.36
There is sometimes confusion over whether the slave codes were originally intended to police racial or class hierarchies, but laws against miscegenation were certainly designed to secure a newly invented white identity.37 More significantly, the nature of hierarchies in colonial America, and the meaning of terms such as equality, inequality, and natural rights, was complicated by the culture of slavery; having excluded blacks from the symbolic economy of whiteness, as it were, distinctions of wealth and status could be applied only to Europeans. Indeed, the existence of a category of people whose identity was located in bondage complicated the terms of whiteness itself. One could not, for example, be a gentleman solely in relation to slaves, who were inherently excluded from “normal” social hierarchies by virtue of their color and status. As a class category, the status of being a gentleman was efficacious only in relation to poor whites; in relation to slaves, however, all whites had power and rank. As Orlando Patterson notes at the conclusion of Slavery and Social Death, the slave's “natal alienation and genealogical isolation” made him or her the ideal conduit for enhancing the slave-owner's status as a subject: “the slaveholder fed on the slave to gain the very direct satisfactions of power over another, honor enhancement, and authority. The slave, losing in the process all claim to autonomous power, was degraded and reduced to a state of liminality.”38
Slavery also changed the meaning of wealth, a key ingredient in the theory and practice of modern identity. In terms of acquisition, only those who owned slaves and land were able to aspire to the status of gentlemen. Studies of the inventories of Jamaica by Richard S. Dunn clearly show that “Negro slaves were the chief asset” in the colony.39 An inheritance of slaves was also central to social rank and the set of relationships that bound the new world aristocracy through marriage. For example, in the world in which Thomas Jefferson grew up and came of age, wealth was reckoned in terms of slaves and land. As John Chester Miller notes, “one of the pillars of the world of Thomas Jefferson was black slavery,” and “slaves were ubiquitous in the society in which Jefferson was reared and in which he came to his majority.”40 In the privileged circles in which Jefferson moved, “it was difficult to find anyone who did not own slaves”: “His father was a slave owner from whom Thomas inherited both land and slaves; all the Randolphs, to whom he was related through his mother, held slaves…. Jefferson's wife's dowry consisted of 132 slaves and many thousands of acres of land. Like other Virginia patricians, he reckoned his wealth principally in slaves and land.” By the time Jefferson came into prominence as one of the great advocates of American freedom and enlightenment, “he was by inheritance, purchase, and marriage, one of the principal slave owners and one of the wealthiest men in Virginia.”41 Here, slavery was the coin of the realm; it was located at the social juncture where inheritance, marriage, and social status converged, and the use of slaves as dowry was indeed a salient indicator of its centrality to domestic relationships.
One of the salient paradoxes of slave culture, then, was that while slaves were considered to belong to a lower order of nature, and their status deprived them of mobility in both the public and private spheres, they were important markers of white identity in the new world. Another paradox structured the relationship between white masters and black slaves: private relations between masters and slaves were intimate, but in public, strict moral and physical boundaries were maintained. One of the most interesting aspects of antebellum architecture, for example, was how its façade—the face of the colonial gentry that was available to public scrutiny—concealed the private, domestic world, inside or behind the great house, in which slavery thrived.42
Consider the case of William Byrd II of Virginia. When he returned from his education in England in the late 1720s, Byrd considered his father's plantation outpost in rural Virginia to be far removed from civilization and too remote from the culture of taste that he had acquired abroad. He therefore set out to build a new house, Westover, that would embody the culture of taste in the antebellum South. Westover was built in an almost exact Georgian style, with “Ornate carved plaster railings, hand-carved decorative woodwork, richly paneled rooms, and an unusual black mantelpiece add[ing] touches of elegance to the interior of the mansion.”43 The building's Georgian façade, however, concealed the thriving political economy that enabled Byrd's taste, for not far behind the building, though not visible from the street or driveway, was to be found a line of slave houses. How did an antebellum gentleman like Byrd reconcile the physical presence of slaves and the institution of enslavement to imported ideals of taste?
Although American gentlemen sought to master the culture of taste that was circulating in England in the eighteenth century and strove to live up to a real or imagined English style, their aspirations often came up against the physical and cultural demands of a new-world cultural geography dominated by slavery. In the West Indies, for example, affluent planters put up buildings “after the English manner,” hoping to impress their European peers. What this meant was the use of “brick or stone in preference to wood and plaster, building multi-storied houses in preference to wide, low bungalows, and using glazed windows rather than louvres or shutters.”44 A panoramic view of Bridgetown, Barbados, drawn by Samuel Copen around 1695, made “this Caribbean port look indistinguishable from a commercial town in England or Holland”: “The houses press close to the wharves, leaving no room for gardens or shade trees. They are tall and narrow structures, three to five stories in height, without balconies or verandahs. This architectural style was better geared to Northern Europe than to the Caribbean.” But this ostensibly elegant, ornate, or classical architecture was often at odds with the physical landscape of the Americas. Judging from the inventory of his household, Sir Henry Morgan, the buccaneer king, “slept in a silken nightgown on a costly bed equipped with mohair curtains, persian lining, and a ‘musketo nett.' His servants, who slept in hammocks, and even his slaves, who slept on the ground, were very likely more comfortable.”45
Yet it was precisely because they were surrounded by the enslaved, people considered to occupy the lowest echelons of nature and culture, that planters came to value, and to identify with, existing notions of high culture. Eager to model themselves on the English aristocracy, colonial gentlemen like Byrd often mobilized high culture to “evaluate or signal status or to create status and monopolize privileges.”46 This mobilization took both direct and indirect forms. Byrd, for example, was notorious for scrupulously following the cultural routine he had witnessed in England and reproducing the social spaces of British high culture. At Westover, for example, he built a li
brary that held four thousand volumes, in English, French, Latin, Hebrew, and Greek. The library was the largest in Virginia and contained “almost any book that a cultivated and thoughtful aristocrat might want.”47
This rehearsal of Englishness, however, reflected a deep anxiety, one that compelled Byrd, like many members of the colonial elite, to engage in what has come to be known as colonial mimicry: the imitation of English manners in situations of displacement.48 Like William Beckford, Byrd seemed to have a good sense of his own troubled relationship to the culture of taste; he, too, was rehearsing culture to account for his own displaced position in the politics of taste. Indeed, there are striking similarities between the Beckfords of Jamaica and the Byrds of Virginia. Like the Beckfords, the Byrds came from poor London stock. They got involved in transatlantic trade in the seventeenth century, and with the proper marital and mercantile connections, they improved their assets and social standing, becoming one of the most prominent families in Virginia. In this sense, Byrd's life can be read as the progress from trade to elegance, from modest beginnings to wealth and status.
Still, it is important to note that the aristocratic conduct that has come to be associated with Byrd—his patriarchal attitude, his literary education, and even his rationalism—was driven by a certain oversensitivity toward rank and social standing. For example, he was upset when his name was omitted from the membership of the Royal Society in 1741, of which he had the honor “to be one of its ancientest members” and to which he had contributed a scientific paper on “the curious phenomenon of a negro with a dappled skin.”49 As indicated by the following letter from Byrd to the Earl of Orrery dated July 5, 1726, the colonial gentleman was eager to remind his European contemporaries that his location in the colonies did not exclude him from the domain of taste:
I have a large family of my own, and my doors are open to every-body, yet I have no bills to pay, and half a crown will rest undisturbed in my pocket for many moons together. Like one of the patriarchs, I have my flocks and my herds, my bond-men and bond-women, and every sort of trade amongst my own servants, so that I live in a kind of independence of everyone but Providence. However, this sort of life is without expense, yet it is attended with a great deal of trouble. I must take care to keep all my people to their duty, to set all the springs in motion, and to make every-one draw his equal share to carry the machine forward. But then ‘tis an amusement in this silent country and a continual exercise of our patience and economy. Another thing, my lord, that recommends this country very much: we sit securely under our vine and our fig trees without any danger to our property. We have neither public robbers nor private, which your lordship will think very strange when we have often needy governors and pilfering convicts sent amongst us…. Thus, my lord, we are very happy in our Canaans, if we could but forget the onions and fleshpots of Egypt.50
What we see here is the language of mimicry, which, as Jacques Lacan has noted, “reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be called an itself that is behind. The effect of mimicry is camouflage.”51 Colonial mimicry performs its work through a double-entendre: it mimics and camouflages its desires and intentions in the same register. In the above example, then, Byrd was speaking the language of the Earl of Orrery—the language of providence, duty, and virtue—but in the process he was also concealing his other identity, his role as a hardened slave master. Sitting on what Homi Bhabha has aptly described as “the margins of metropolitan desire,”52 Byrd would use language and self-presentation to conceal the fact that what he was calling “my people” were, in fact, African slaves.
Why did Byrd seek an identity in mimicry? To answer this question, we have to remember that culture, as Lamont and Fournier have taught us, is located in the world of organizations and institutions of power: “Culture is not only a code or mode of communication: it is also a form of domination, an ideology at the service of the dominant classes.”53 For Byrd, an overt acknowledgment of the value of African and Africanized cultures would be a form of social abnegation, a fatal threat to racial and class hierarchies. Like other members of the American plantocracy, Byrd needed European forms of art and culture that would enable him to maintain status in the midst of slavery. European high culture was associated with notions of order; it connoted “unity, harmony, balance, correctness, and rationality” and was assumed to emerge out of a “humane consensus,” one that enabled “a harmonious community.”54 In these circumstances, Byrd's mimicry of Englishness was simultaneously a form of affiliation and expression of deep anxieties about belonging.
Yet Byrd lived in a world saturated by African slaves, and, like most planters, he had an intimate social relation with them.55 But this intimacy bled fear and loathing. From the West Indies to the antebellum South, the black slave was considered to be the embodiment of what I will refer to in later chapters as a negative sensorium, their color, figure, and hair “physical distinctions proving a difference of race.”56 The black slave was the living embodiment of that which the planter class considered vulgar and distasteful. The slave-owning class often shared the fears, expressed most poignantly by Jefferson, that the existence of slavery depraved the “manners and morals” of the masters.57 Byrd expressed the fear that Virginia might one day come to be known as “New Guinea.”58
The specter of blackness would become manifest during the Haitian revolution, a spectacular and phantasmic event, one that was as apprehended as the threat to white civilization itself. Describing the destruction of the city of Cap Français in September 1791, the Jamaican planter and historian Bryan Edwards posited it as an event that was dreadful and horrific, “a sight more terrible than the mind of any man, unaccustomed to such a scene, can easily conceive.”59 For Edwards, the overpowering of white civilization by what Dayan has aptly described as “the horrors of Africa” would be presented in aesthetic terms:60 “Until those ravages and devastations which I have had the painful task of recording, deformed and destroyed, with undistinguishing barbarity, both the bounties of nature, and the labours of art, the possessions of France in this noble island were considered as the garden of the West Indies, and for beautiful scenery, richness of soil, might justly be deemed the Paradise of the New World.”61 The cultivation of culture had been one of the enabling conditions of white civilization in the tropics; its destruction by the revolting slaves signaled the precariousness of beauty in the theater of enslavement. More immediately for my discussion here, it was the apprehension that African barbarity might overcome the logic of civilization—the fear that Virginia might become a New Guinea—that prompted slave masters like Byrd to initiate “strenuous measures to maintain the civilized way of life of the social class to which they aspired.”62 But could this “civilized way of life,” enacted through art, run parallel with slavery and enslavement?
4
The political economy of slavery made it difficult for a civilized way of life—or a culture of taste—to be simply transplanted to the American colonies. In the world of slavery, a new economy emerged that transformed notions of time and space and hence disturbed the subject's relation to its world. As Mechal Sobel has argued in her studies of black and white self-fashioning in colonial Virginia, in slavery almost all established European and African norms of selfhood, temporalities, and space were thrown askew.63 The challenge for the slave-owning caste was to develop forms of art that conjured a pure and refined image of self and community and yet were rooted in the totality of plantation life.
As would-be civilized subjects, planters could not give up the idea of manners and morals, or even the cultivation of the arts, as the insignias of modern life; indeed, the emergence of painting as the most prestigious form of art coincided with the planter class's awareness of the significance of high culture in colonial self-fashioning. Painting would now be embraced in the American colonies as the art of prestige; but it would come to be structured by a paradox. On one hand, painting was the most prestigious form of art, because it was the least connected to
the materiality and hardships of everyday life in the Americas and thus allowed for the enactment of an imaginary European identity in the colonies. On the other hand, because painting had no “use value,” there was no incentive for artists to produce art for its own sake.64 More specifically, there seemed no imperative for American paintings to account for their local identity or even to gesture to their geographical context. Compared to their European counterparts, colonial American paintings seem amateurish in character and of poor quality, a fact that has been explained in terms of limited markets for works of art, the paucity of a leisured class to consume it, and the plantocracy's sense of inferiority in relation to European connoisseurs of art.
Some critics have also blamed the failure of American colonial art on the cultured class's contentment with its identity as “a provincial reflection of the great styles of European paintings transmitted here via England.”65 But even European models for art across the Atlantic were themselves inadequate, for until the arrival of continental painters in the late seventeenth century, American portraits were not based on actual artistic styles but on what was imagined to be European art. Indeed, a cursory look at some representative colonial American paintings underscores their limitation in relation to the ostensibly informing tradition; these works now appear removed from the great European style of the time and alienated from their immediate context.
Slavery and the Culture of Taste Page 23
