Slavery and the Culture of Taste

by Gikandi, Simon;

  It is, of course, possible that when European slavers undressed African slaves and paraded them naked on deck or on arrival at the slave markets of the Americas, they were not pondering the theological meaning of this gesture, its connection to Genesis, or the puritanical reading of it, but it is unlikely that they did not consider the act of undressing the slave in terms of symbolic debasement, just as today's torturers begin their task by reducing their victims to a state of nakedness. What is apparent, however, is that when slaves stepped out of the slave ship, they were often naked, or almost naked, and this nakedness did not represent uncleanliness, or even the absence of righteousness, but cultural lack. Slave traders perceived such acts of undressing as a key precondition for enslavement. Here, the slavers were not simply reducing slaves to a state of beastliness but also depriving them of the capacity for memory and social connection. In short, from their own experiences as early modern subjects, the slave traders understood that clothing was “a form of material memory,” one that “incorporated the wearer into a system of obligations.”78 Thus the representations of the slaves' arrival and sale in America captured in images such as William Blake's illustration Group of Negroes, as imported to be sold for slaves (fig. 5.10) could call attention to the two profound ironies in the exhibition of the naked body—or half-naked body—in the public square. First, there was the elaborate and colorful dress of the slave agents, which would stand in stark contrast to the nakedness or semi-nakedness of their merchandise. Second, there was the irony of symbolic reversal: the Europeans were parading the Africans in the very states they had condemned as un-Christian and barbaric.

  The project of disciplining the African into docility went hand in hand with his or her reduction to a state of pure functionality as a body. A dual process seems to have been at work here: the impoverishment of the meaning of work through the establishment of routines, and the violent marking of the body as an object of ownership. Many slave accounts call attention to what it meant to work according to rules and regulations outside one's set of desires or norms. For example, reflecting on her new regimen the morning after the auction block, Mary Prince noted the connection between work and violence in the following words:

  5.10 William Blake, Group of Negroes, as imported to be sold for slaves. 1796. From John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. Copy in Princeton University Library.

  5.11 Branding Slaves. From William O. Blake, The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade (Columbus, Ohio, 1857), p. 97.

  The next morning my mistress set about instructing me in my tasks. She taught me to do all sorts of household work; to wash and bake, pick cotton and wool, and wash floors, and cook. And she taught me (how can I ever forget it!) more things than these; she caused me to know the exact difference between the smart of the rope, the cart-whip, and the cow-skin, when applied to my naked body by her own cruel hand. And there was scarcely any punishment more dreadful than the blows I received on my face and head from her hard heavy fist. She was a fearful woman, and a savage mistress to her slaves.79

  As for the marking of the slave as an object of ownership, there is perhaps no better representation of the complex semiotics involved here than the branding of the enslaved (fig. 5.11). Here, in the inaugural site of enslavement, the brand would distinguish slaves from free subjects. Marked with the insignia of their owners, either a company or an individual, the slaves' relation to their labor would be alienated; to a slave, work and task would not be forms of fulfilling desire but modes of objectification. For the enslaved, like the laborers discussed by Marx in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, this objectification would appear as a process of displacement from reality, and alienated labor would manifest itself as estrangement because the more objects the laborer produces, “the less he can possess and the more he falls under the sway of his product, capital.”80

  The final stage in the process of the Africans' objectification—of becoming a stranger to oneself, as it were—was renaming the slaves. For most African slaves this was a significant loss, because in the cultures from which they came, names, perhaps more than livery, represented cultural capital, with the immense capacity to embody memory and link subjects to a set of social and moral obligations that, in turn, signaled the subject's connection to what French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu once called a habitus—a set of socially acquired dispositions and predispositions.81 In fact, it should be noted that in most of the African communities that the slaves were coming from—Akan, Mandingo, Yoruba, Congo, and Igbo, just to mention a few—names were the carriers of heavy symbolic meaning, joining individuals to families, communities, and, as in the case of the patronym, to the foundations of a polity. Africans valued names and what they connoted more than their European captors did; for Africans, the name was the core of a subject's basic relationship to a community and history.82

  We can deduce, for example, that for slaves such as Equiano, the process of imposed naming, renaming, and unnaming signaled the radical disorientation of the slave in moral space: “While I was on board this ship, my captain and master named me Gustavus Vassa. I at that time began to understand him a little, and refused to be called so, and told him as well as I could that I would be called Jacob; but he said I should not, and still called me Gustavus; and when I refused to answer to my new name, which at first I did, it gained me many a cuff; so at length I submitted, and by which I have been known ever since.”83 To be turned into slaves, Africans like Equiano had to give up their spaces of emplacement and try to seek orientation in regulated confinement; they had to be subjected to a process of symbolic stripping that reduced them to raw nature, outside culture, outside moral spaces; and through the process of unnaming, they had to be unhinged from communities of kinship.

  What did this string of negations add up to? It is easy to imagine the “middle passage,” like the sea in which it was enacted, as a big empty space, a place without monuments, where tribal memories were interred and locked up, a place where those looking for history would only encounter “the men with eyes heavy as anchors / who sank without tombs.”84 Alternatively, the middle passage could be seen as “the passage through death / to life upon these shores.”85 In either case, it is hard to find any value that one can adduce to the slaves' passage of transition from Africa to the Americas except to describe it as a state of non-culture, one only available to us through the negative language of loss and wordlessness. Still, reflections on extremely negative experiences, sites of traumatic transition, do invite important questions: What does the negativity of cultural being, the sense of living without cultural capital, value, or the sense of obligations that come with it, do to the self? When the slaves were reduced to bodies in the purely functional sense described above, what happened to their prior senses, forms of habit, or patterns of behavior? What was the relation between their old signs and the phenomena in front of them? In short, could a sensorium survive the middle passage? Stephanie Smallwood has posed these questions in a slightly different way: “To what extent, if at all, were Africans able to work free of the slave ship, the saltwater, and the agenda of the Atlantic market?”86

  The semiosis of this transformation, rather than its history or political economy, is my focus here. Slave testimony constantly referred to the sense of bewilderment and shock slaves felt on encountering a world they were not prepared to comprehend or even place in perspective, a world in which signs and signifiers seemed out of joint. In Virginia, Equiano would recall his first encounter with objects and activities that, though banal and quotidian aspects of his master's modern life, struck fear and terror in him because they caused sensual disorientation. Equiano felt adrift in the new world, bereft of the deep experiences for which he had a descriptive vocabulary or cultural grammar, struggling to produce meanings for the new and to endow it with significance. Here, in the American slave plantation, Equiano found that the integers of time, emotion, and everydayness that had made him an
African were of no value; indeed, a prior language for describing cultural experience often impeded Equiano's capacity to develop a grammar of modern identity:

  While I was in this plantation, the gentleman, to whom I supposed the estate belonged, being unwell, I was one day sent for to his dwelling house to fan him: when I came into the room where he was, I was very much affrighted at some things I saw, and the more so as I had seen a black woman slave as I came through the house, who was cooking the dinner, and the poor creature was cruelly loaded with various kinds of iron machines; she had one particularly on her head, which locked her mouth so fast that she could scarcely speak; and could not eat nor drink. I was much astonished and shocked at this contrivance, which I afterwards learned was called the iron muzzle. Soon after I had a fan put into my hand, to fan the gentleman while he slept; and so I did indeed with great fear. While he was fast asleep I indulged myself a great deal in looking about the room, which to me appeared very fine and curious. The first object that engaged my attention was a watch which hung on the chimney, and was going. I was quite surprised at the noise it made, and was afraid it would tell the gentleman any thing I might do amiss: and when I immediately after observed a picture hanging in the room, which appeared constantly to look at me, I was still more affrighted, having never seen such things as these before. At one time I thought it was something relative to magic; and not seeing it move, I thought it might be some way the whites had to keep their great men when they died, and offer them libations as we used to do our friendly spirits. In this state of anxiety I remained till my master awoke, when I was dismissed out of the room, to my no small satisfaction and relief, for I thought that these people were all made of wonders.87

  In the eyes of the slave masters, the objects that had frightened Equiano, including the dreadful muzzle, were easily explicable and functional. But the slave found it difficult to find descriptive terms for these previously unknown things, and unable to adduce some deep meaning to instruments of dehumanization, or even to provide a linguistic accounting for the strange and mechanical, the slave was marooned in cultural space.

  In this particular instance, Equiano's description of the watch and its assumed function could only serve to call attention to the dissonance between the thing and its meaning, the sign and the signifier. Nothing in the slave's earlier life could help him make this new world intelligible; he could neither invoke his Igbo past nor the Englishness that he would later aspire to in order to make sense of the geography of enslavement. In effect, when it came to the production of meaning, an essential condition of being a subject, Equiano was living in a state of cultural limbo. He was in a world where the relation between words and things was one of incommensurability, the result of which was a negative hermeneutics. To put it another way, the slave could only articulate the meaning of things by expressing what he could not know or understand, what appeared to be at odds with his own apparatus of understanding. This negative hermeneutics was, however, not simply a case of linguistic inadequacy; rather, it was informed by several factors that go directly to the role of melancholy in the structuring of identity and cultural experience. In the scene represented above, for example, Equiano was lost for words, not emotions.

  And yet the slave was keen to make sense of his new world, because the expression of feelings without thoughts seemed to him inadequate. For example, Equiano knew, almost intuitively, that the things that didn't make sense to him played an important role in the culture of enslavement. He sensed, for example, that the iron muzzle was a powerful insignia of the disciplinary project of enslavement; that the watch symbolized the temporality of modernity itself; that the iron pots were instruments of daily living. So in order to have bearing in this world, Equiano desperately needed to be able to make sense of the objects that defined it yet eluded his African vocabulary. But when he was unable to produce meanings, to make sense of things with mere words, Equiano turned to the weapon of affect, keenly telling his readers how he felt—”exceedingly miserable and lonely.”

  It is this link between the loss of words and the buildup of emotion that I find intriguing. Why is it that Equiano, finding himself with no way of apprehending the world of slavery through what linguistics calls pragmatics (a context for creating and shaping meaning), could only make sense of the objects and experiences he was encountering by expressing his emotional response to them? The answer to this question has already been denoted at the beginning of this chapter: it was melancholia, the emotion of loss and desire, that most effectively provided a language for expressing moral disorientation. And so long as the slave could express powerful emotions in response to his or her condition of bondage, it would appear that the middle passage had not numbed the senses and sensations of the slave.

  5

  But this last claim—that the middle passage did not rob the slave of the power of the senses—leads to another puzzle: If slaves reacted to their condition of enslavement in such powerful and often melancholic gestures, including suicide, why were they often considered by observers to be subjects without sense and sensibility in the terms defined by the culture of taste discussed in earlier chapters? Why were they only associated with a negative sensorium, a ratio of senses that could not be construed to be a source of identity?88 This question cannot be answered by a simple archeology of the slaves' emotions or their affective response to enslavement. On the contrary, in order to understand the exile of slaves from the order of the senses, we must shift focus from the experiences of the Africans themselves to the moral and symbolic economies of their masters. After all, one of the operative premises in this book is that narratives that separate the worlds—and words—of slaves and masters miss their informative and sometimes fatal intersection.

  The senses occupied an important place in the domain of the masters. In fact, the order of the senses (and the discourses that surrounded them) was not a neutral term in the eighteenth century; rather, sensuousness was a category with a particular value in the self-understanding of modern European culture. For many European writers and intellectuals in the culture of taste, the period in which African slaves found themselves transformed into bodies in bondage, sentiment and sensibility were key cultural terms.89 Initially developed as technical terms in medicine, philosophy, and psychology, by the middle of the eighteenth century sentiment and sensibility had come to be used “to describe the expression of heightened intense human feeling, of a new sort of refinement” and a sign of a sense of inwardness, of a selfhood whose standing was, unlike in the case of politeness, dependent on one's relation to others.90 Thus if one is looking for a term that bridges the well-known divide between continental European philosophy and British ideas of the aesthetic, it is sensuousness—the singular investment in the senses as a mode of understanding human experience—as what one critic has called “the analogon to reason.”91

  When Alexander Baumgarten coined the term aesthetic in 1735, his goal was to show that sensuality was not inferior to reason. In this context, Baumgarten's ambition was to develop a new “science of sensual recognition” to complement “the rationalist focus of analysis on the ‘higher' or ‘rational' forms of recognition.” The ambition of Baumgarten's aesthetic project was to show “that sensuality, in some contexts and for some objects, provides an adequate ‘representation' of reality the same way reason does for rationalist philosophy.” He then goes on to show how the aesthetic, as sensuous cognition, underwent a radical transformation, one that turned it into an alternative to rationality: “Sensual cognition—this is the basic insight of Baumgarten's new discipline of aesthetics—could not be shown to possess right or significance equal to rational cognition by analyzing it according to the model rationalist philosophy had developed. The goal of aesthetics—the enlargement of the realm of legitimate cognition, including sensual forms—required an epistemological break with the very understanding of legitimate cognition as such.”92

  Within the Scottish Enlightenment, the senses were associated with innate m
oral values or virtues that were essential to the maintenance of a modern self. In his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, Francis Hutcheson argued that there was an implicit connection between pleasant ideas and sound; subjects with a good ear were able, through their superior perception of sound, to derive pleasure from ideas. Now the order of the senses was the key to understanding modern identity:

  It is of no consequence whether we call these ideas of beauty and harmony perceptions of the external senses of seeing and hearing, or not. I should rather choose to call our power of perceiving these ideas, internal sense, were it only for the convenience of distinguishing the from other sensations of seeing and hearing, which men may have with out perception of beauty and harmony. It is plain from experience, many men have in the common meaning, the senses of seeing, and hearing perfect enough; they perceive all the simple ideas separately, and have their pleasures; they distinguish them from each other, such as one color from another, either quite different, or the stronger or fainter of the same color, when they are placed beside each other, although they may often confound their names, when they occur apart from each other; as some do the names of green and blue: they can tell in separate notes, the higher, lower, sharper or flatter, when separately sounded; in figures they discern the length, breadth, wideness of each line, surface angle; and may be as capable of hearing and seeing at great distances as any men whatsoever; and yet perhaps they shall find no pleasure in musical compositions, in painting, architecture, natural landscape; or but a very weak one in comparison of what others enjoy from the same objects. This greater capacity of receiving such pleasant ideas we commonly call a fine genius or taste: in music we seem universally to acknowledge something like a distinct sense from the external one of hearing, and call it a good ear; and the like distinction we should probably acknowledge in other objects, had we also got distinct names to denote these powers of perception by.93