Represented in its banality, the act of enslavement would become a quotidian event. Indeed, the only reason that we know violence was attendant to acts of enslavement is because of the powerful testimony left to us by former slaves. It was in the slaves' testimony that the ordinariness of the slave trade was challenged by powerful semantic gestures. For example, one of the most powerful counterpoints to Newton's journal was Olaudah Equiano's famous description of his first encounter with the slave ship:
The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship's cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceiveable.88
In Equiano's narrative, the act of enslavement, which was also his own forced entry into modernity, represented a violent form of disciplining in which the power of the masters was matched only by the powerlessness of the slave. The violent transformation of the self from a being into a commodity, which is the gist of the first sections of Equiano's narrative, was the essence of what Orlando Patterson has called social death.89
There is a second problem that emerges in the management of slaves within the culture of taste: slave masters cultivated the identity of gentlemen and thus did not want to be associated visibly with the violence that was essential to the effective running of a plantation. In The History of Jamaica, Edward Long described the native white men of the island, the white Creoles, as “in general sensible, of quick apprehension, brave, good natured, affable, generous, temperate, and sober; unsuspicious, lovers of freedom, fond of social enjoyments, tender fathers, humane and indulgent masters.”90 Long acknowledged that white Creoles had some foibles—such as indolence, temperament, and addiction to expensive living—but he was revolted by the suggestion that these slave masters treated their slaves with barbarity and angrily rejected their stigmatization as “West-Indian tyrants, inhuman oppressors, and bloody inquisitors.” Leaping to the defense of his Creole compatriots, Long compared Jamaican slave masters to English country squires, going as far as to argue that there was no order of men in Britain “[p]ossessed of more-disinterested charity, philanthropy, and clemency than the Creole gentlemen of this island.” Long noted that he had never known—”and rarely heard”—of “any cruelty either practiced or tolerated by them [the masters] over their Negroes.”91 How, then, could Long explain the many instances of torture in Jamaica, where new technologies of punishment such as the treadmill (fig. 4.11) had emerged in the eighteenth century?92
4.11 “An Interior View of a Jamaica House of Correction.” 1837. Engraving.
Long's apologia for the plantocracy was, of course, intended to oppose abolitionism and should be read in that context. But more than an apologia, the representation of the slave owner as a gentleman was an important mode of identity, a social mask that, as I suggested earlier in this chapter, enabled the men of taste to deal with the contradictions and anxieties of slavery, especially in relation to the indices of modernity and civilized behavior that were central to their European identity. For even if violence was considered to be a necessary instrument in the process of enslavement, an integral part of the technology of slavery, dirty work best left to others, didn't it at an existential level trouble those who were ultimately morally responsible for its existence and enforcement?
Still, neither art nor manners could entirely quarantine the planter class from the ugliness of slavery. Consider the reaction of the Dorset planter and merchant John Pinney on his first visit to a slave market in St. Kitts in a letter dated 1765, about a year after his arrival on the island: “Since my arrival I've purchased 9 Negro slaves in St Kitts and can assure you I was shocked at the first appearance of human flesh for sale. But surely God ordained ‘em for the use and benefit of us' otherwise his Divine Will would have been made manifest to us by some particular sign or token.”93 Pinney's unsettledness at the site of flesh on sale is important not because it points to a lurking conscience in the slave master, but because it underscores one of the points I have been making throughout this book: that whatever we think about the actions of the slave-owning class, we must locate them solidly in the culture of the eighteenth century, a culture driven by a fundamental belief in the integrity and autonomy of the self but also eager to rationalize acts that seemed to be necessary but at odds with the doctrine of selfhood. What this means is that slavery haunted modern culture precisely because it called its ideals of selfhood and freedom into question. For if we accept Charles Taylor's claim that the coming into being of the category of the economic in the eighteenth century reflected the higher value put on the “dimension of human existence,” then the slave trade did put into question the meaning of a transaction that was enabled by the devaluation and dehumanization of what was initially conceived as another human being.94
As modern subjects, slave traders, merchants, and planters operated within the parameters of an eighteenth-century doxa that privileged the self and its claims to freedom and liberty over other things. Thus, even as he bought and buried slaves, John Newton continued to insist that the greatest blessings “of which human nature was capable are undoubtedly religion, liberty, and love.”95 The slave trader was not an aberration from his milieu; he was not a callous person existing outside the culture and morality of the modern age, nor did he take the objectification of the slave for granted or consider its human identity ipso facto. If this were the case, neither the technologies deployed to dehumanize the African nor resorting to theories to justify the enslavement of others because of their race would have been necessary. It is not incidental, then, that no sooner had slave traders encountered the shock of the human body on sale that they fell back, almost instinctively, on theories of providence, which seem intended to rationalize their own uneasiness with the act of enslavement.
Indeed, it is a mark of the slavers' modern identity as free, self-reflective subjects that when confronted by human bodies on sale and compelled to justify their role in this dehumanizing transaction, they turned elsewhere, to religion and God, to explain enslavement. Alternatively, they shifted the burden of enslavement to the Africans themselves. For example, in order to reconcile the trade in human beings with the theories of liberty and freedom that enabled his own subjectivity, John Newton was quick to evacuate the African from the circle of the human. He foregrounded his identity as a religious man, one who valued his freedom and liberty, and upheld these qualities as the defining characteristics of human nature, against what he saw as the Africans' cultural and moral deficits:
The three greatest blessings of which human nature is capable are undoubtedly religion, liberty, and love. In each of these how highly has God distinguished me! But here in Africa are whole nations around me, whose languages are entirely different from each other, yet I believe they all agree in this, that they have no words among them expressive of these engaging ideas…. These poor creatures are not only strangers to the advantages which I enjoy, but are plunged in all the contrary evils…they are deceived and harassed by necromancing, magic, and all the train of superstitions that fear, combined with ignorance, can produce in the human mind. The only liberty of which they have any notion, is an exemption from being sold; and even from this very few are perfectly secu
re…for it often happens, that the man who sells another on board a ship, is himself bought and sold in the same manner, and perhaps in the same vessel, before the week is ended.96
And once he had recovered from the initial shock of “human flesh exposed on sale,” John Pinney, who was committed to a humanistic project in his management of slaves, sought comfort in the designs of providence and the solace of divine will.
But even after enslavement had been presented as the cause and explanation of the African's debasement, and once violence had been accepted as necessary to enforcing God's will, it was still important to show that one could uphold what were ostensibly conflicting identities—those of a slave master and those of a person of virtue and taste. From ship captains to plantation masters, agents of slavery were often eager to argue and show, in the most forceful and dramatic manner possible, that a life in the political economy of slavery did not in itself preclude one from civilized culture or the aesthetic order. As a marker of modernity, the aesthetic idea attracted slave owners because it was built on powerful transcendental claims, just as notions of taste were justified through a compelling notion of disinterest. Transcendentalism and disinterest made it possible to separate the culture of taste and enslavement even in those spaces—the plantation, for example—where they were forced to coexist. Disinterest did not, of course, occlude the persistent violence that informed colonial culture. And since violence was a necessary condition of enslavement, it either needed to be explained away or turned into a perverse sense of pleasure. In fact, as Marcus Wood and other scholars of the iconography of slavery have shown, slavery was itself an aesthetic project, one located in the problematic of pain, torture, and suffering as it emerged in the modern period.97
Still, the theoretical literature on the aesthetics of pain has presented us with three complicated, if not intangible, problems. The first problem was raised, in a different context, by Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain. In this groundbreaking book, Scarry argued that the fact that we continue to invoke “analogies to remote cosmologies” to explain painful experiences is itself a sign of the capacity of pain to achieve “its aversiveness in part by bringing about, even within the radius of several feet, this absolute split between one's sense of one's reality and the reality of other persons.”98 How, for example, could slave masters and drivers sanction extreme suffering yet seek to live by humanitarian maxims? How could one live a life of pleasure when surrounded by an endless drama of terror and human suffering?
The second problem concerns the value of pain for those who inflicted it. Did those in power find it easy to inflict pain on others because they had been able to exclude their victims from the domain of the human through what Scarry would consider to be an act of anaesthetization, or was there a sense in which the infliction of suffering was turned into an aesthetic and pleasurable form? And how could pain be represented so that it was pleasurable? A characteristic aspect of pain, argues Scarry, is “its capacity to resist language”; indeed, physical pain “does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before a language is learned.”99 However, the ability of pain to shatter language is valid only on an abstract or conceptual level, because quite often, especially for victims of torture and other extreme forms of suffering, a testimonial to pain demands a summoning of the most radical forms of expressiveness. In the culture of slavery, for example, pain was not a state of consciousness with “referential content” nor was it a phenomenon that resisted “objectification in language.”100 On the contrary, the state of enslavement objectified pain by making a radical distinction, in the disciplinary apparatus, between those who meted it out and those who suffered it.
For slaves, the regimen of punishment, torture, and pain was a reminder that they existed outside the domain of the human; punishment was not the response to a radical departure from an established code of human behavior but a regulatory mechanism designed to enhance dehumanization through its domestication. For the masters, on the other hand, the regime of punishment, pain, and torture demanded the routinization of an efficient system of subjection. What this meant was that pain was not shared between masters and slaves nor did it demand or imply empathy. For masters, the affliction of pain on slaves was rarely a source of visible anguish; the fact that the objects of torture were not considered to be part of the human community that administered the punishment excluded empathy. In other words, unlike forms of punishment directed at criminals and the poor in Europe, or even poor whites in the Americas, the torture of the slave was considered to be of a different order, since the victim and the victimizer were not competing for the same rights of selfhood or liberty. It is in this context that the public spectacle of punishment came to acquire aesthetic value.101
The aesthetization of punishment constitutes an important part of the archival of enslavement. A vivid example of this can be found in the second volume of Bryan Edwards's History Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies, in a section where the planter historian describes Tacky's revolt of 1760 in Jamaica, an uprising started by slaves in Ballard Beckford's frontier plantation in St. Mary's County. After providing an elaborate description of the antics of the revolting Coromantee (or Koromantyn) slaves and their leader, Tacky, Edward would turn his attention to the punishment meted on the revolters:
Tacky, the chief, was killed in the woods by one of the parties that went into pursuit of them; but some others of the ringleaders being taken, and a general inclination to revolt appearing among all the Koroman Negroes in the island, it was thought necessary to make a few terrible examples of some of the most guilty. Of three who were clearly proved to have been concerned in the murders committed at Ballard's Valley, one was condemned to be burnt, and the other two to be hung alive in irons and left to perish in this dreadful situation. The wretch that was burnt was made to sit on the ground, and his body being chained to an iron stake, the fire was applied to his feet. He uttered not a groan, and saw his legs reduced to ashes with the utmost firmness and composure; after which, one of his arms by some means getting loose, he snatched a brand from the fire that was consuming him, and flung it in the face of the executioner. The two that were hung up alive were indulged, at their own request, with a hearty meal immediately before they were suspended on the gibbet, which was erected in the parade of the town of Kingston. From that time, until they expired, they never uttered the least complaint, except only of cold in the night, but diverted themselves all day long in discourse with their countrymen, who were permitted, very improperly, to surround the gibbet. On the seventh day a notion prevailed among the spectators, that one of them wished to communicate an important secret to his master, my near relation; who being in St. Mary's, the commanding officer sent for me. I endeavoured, by means of an interpreter, to let him know that I was present; but I could not understand what he said in return. I remember that both he and his fellow sufferer laughed immoderately at something that occurred,—I know not what. The next morning one of them silently expired, as did the other on the morning of the ninth day.102
A year before the publication of his history, Edwards would turn the scene of the burning of a slave rebel into the centerpiece of a set of stanzas about freedom, the will of nature, and the power of love.103 And like other poems that Edwards had written or commissioned, including Isaac Teale's “The Sable Venus,” these stanzas were intended to summon poetry to act as a counterpart to a landscape of violence and bondage that the author thought was unjustly maligned in the British imagination.
But the act of punishing the slave went beyond aesthetic value—it was also sexualized and commingled with sensory needs. Frederick Douglass's clear understanding of the direct connection between sexualized violence prompted him to recall and narrate the beating of Aunt Hester by her predatory master at the beginning of his classic slave narrative:
Before he commenced whipping Aunt Hester,
he took her into the kitchen, and stripped her from neck to waist, leaving her neck, shoulders, and back, entirely naked. He then told her to cross her hands, calling her at the same time a d——d b——h. After crossing her hands, he tied them with a strong rope, and led her to a stool under a large hook in the joist, put in for the purpose. He made her get upon the stool, and tied her hands to the hook. She now stood fair for his infernal purpose. Her arms were stretched up at their full length, so that she stood upon the ends of her toes. He then said to her, “Now, you d——d b——h, I'll learn you how to disobey my orders!” and after rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor. I was so terrified and horror-stricken at the sight, that I hid myself in a closet, and dared not venture out till long after the bloody transaction was over.104
Clearly, the act of punishing the slave was not purely instrumental—it was bound up with perverse pleasures. But how could the ravaged body of the slave invite pleasure?
A third problem in the discourse of pain—and and thus the persistence of punishment as part of an exhibitionary, aesthetic order—concerns the transformation of the economy of violence at the end of the eighteenth century, discussed at length by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. In the introduction to his book, Foucault discusses the process by which, through a succession of penal reforms at the end of the century, the “tortured, dismembered, amputated body, symbolically branded on face or shoulder” disappeared from view as “the major target of penal repression.”105 In the new penal regimen, Foucault argued, punishment was sent underground and publicity was shifted to the process of trial and sentence. As a consequence, the body was deprived of the symbolic authority previously embodied by the spectacle of torture and punishment and was retained merely as an intermediary. Foucault concluded, “If the body now serves as an instrument or intermediary: if one intervenes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive the individual of a liberty that is regarded both as a right and as a property.”106
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