Slavery and the Culture of Taste

by Gikandi, Simon;

  The very appearance of a procession of slaves in the nation's capital, noted Tallmadge, was a vivid illustration of the way of life the South wanted to preserve:

  Since we have been engaged in this debate, we have witnessed an elucidation of this argument, of bettering the condition of slaves, by spreading them over the country. A slave driver, a trafficker in human flesh, as if sent by Providence, has passed the door of your Capitol, on his way to the West, driving before him about fifteen of these wretched victims of his power, collected in the course of his traffic, and, by their removal, torn from every relation, and from every tie which the human heart can hold dear. The males, who might raise the arm of vengeance and retaliate for their wrongs, were hand-cuffed, and chained to each other, while the females and children were marched in their rear, under the guidance of the driver's whip! Yes, sir, such has been the scene witnessed from the windows of Congress Hall, and viewed by members who compose the legislative councils of Republican America.4

  Could any state of freedom be imagined outside the shadow of slavery?

  FRAGMENT II

  Sometimes the repressed histories of the enslaved would emerge out of their places of entombment to question the drive of modernity and modernization. At least that seems to have been the case in June 1991when excavations for a new federal government office building in New York City revealed the remains of four hundred Africans, mostly slaves, who had been buried there, some as early as the 1690s. Here, below the ground in Lower Manhattan, a place intimately associated with a triumphant culture of consumption and taste, on the site where the logic of modernization and capitalism rose as high as the glass and steel buildings that protruded over the Atlantic Ocean and the Hudson River, lay the allegory of the ruin of modernity, its petrified life hidden so that its glories would shine.5

  In these remains of African slaves in New York, the peculiar institution had been preserved as, to borrow words from Susan Burck-Morss, “a skeletal residue with its empty stare that was once, an animated face.”6 These stories—of skeletons in the closet of modernity—can be found everywhere modernity has taken root from Vera Cruz, Mexico, to Cape Town, South Africa. Here, too, the insignias of modern civilization—the ports and the cruise ships, the modern university, and the vineyards—rise over the bones of the enslaved. How can these ghosts be laid to rest? Can civilization be freed from the specter of difference?

  FRAGMENT III

  On January 20, 2009, around noon Eastern Standard Time, Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated as the forty-fourth president of the United States, an event attended by a million people and watched by around 600 million worldwide. Among the many meanings adduced to this historic event, the most poignant was perhaps the claim that it had raised the ghost of slavery and then put it to rest. For if slavery was the mark of the exclusion of the African from the institutions of modern culture, then it could be said that the election of a black person to the highest office in the land, an act that guaranteed that the son of an African was now the custodian of late modernity and its problems, seemed to be proof that the catastrophe of history was also the condition of possibility of the idea of human freedom.

  Obama was sworn in before a monument built by African slaves; his historical procession walked on ground trodden by coffles of black men, women, and children in shackles; a slave market once stood on the same mall where the masses had gathered to serenade the new president; many of his illustrious predecessors had assumed that their standing as members of the American aristocracy was connected to the ownership of slaves. Did the election of a black president imply that the continuum of history had exploded and that the dream of freedom as the universal right of all human beings had been realized? Had the story of slavery, as some commentators suggested, turned full circle?7

  Derek Walcott, who had started his illustrious poetic career agonizing over the meaning of the vault of new world experience, would see lyrical possibilities in the breakup of history:

  Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving —

  a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls,

  an emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd

  dividing like the furrow which a mule has ploughed,

  parting for their president.8

  Was it possible that slavery, which had functioned as the threshold of modernity, would no longer haunt the present? Only time would tell. What seemed obvious was that the ghosts in the archives and tombs of the modern world would perhaps need a new language to account for the “impossible prophecy” signified by the Obama moment. Hence the aura of blackness would need to be cast in new terms, new idioms, and new vocabularies; it would have to be displaced from its traditional inscription as the stigmata of modernity. Then the turmoil of slavery would give way to what was always assumed, by masters and slaves alike, to be the impossible prophecy of a common modern identity.

  Notes

  PREFACE

  1. Walcott, “The Sea Is History,” Collected Poems, 364.

  2. Abraham and Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia,” 125–38.

  3. Ibid., 130.

  4. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 3.

  5. Ibid., 7.

  6. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 41–42.

  7. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 227.

  CHAPTER ONE. OVERTURE: SENSIBILITY IN THE AGE OF SLAVERY

  1. Bosman, New and Accurate Description, 117.

  2. The image of the black in the early modern period is outside the scope of this book, but see the following general surveys by Erickson, “Representations of Blacks and Blackness,” 499–527, and “Moment of Race,” 27–36; and the essays collected in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, ed. Earler and Lowe. See also the pioneering work of E. Jones, Elizabethan Image and Othello's Countrymen. See also K. Hall, Things of Darkness; Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism; and the essays collected in Hendricks and Parker, Women, “Race,” and Writing.

  3. Kunst, African in European Art, 23. Kunst's view is challenged or qualified by Kim Hall in “Object into Object?” 346–79. For a biography of Rembrandt, see Schama, Rembrandt's Eyes.

  4. Donnan in Documents Illustrative of the History 1:149–50. The book was first published by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., 1930–1935.

  5. The civilizing process is discussed by Elias in Civilizing Process, 363–448.

  6. This point has been underscored by Allison Blakely in Blacks in the Dutch World, 119. Kim Hall provides a compelling reading of the role of the black figure on the margins of the early modern portrait in “Object into Object?” 321–24.

  7. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 17–52. Here I'm thinking of Karl Marx's famous use of a religious analogy to describe the emergence, in capitalism, of a relationship “between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things” and his precise conclusion: “This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.” See Capital 1:165. What Marx forgot to say was that the concept of the fetish (Portuguese fetissio) was invented to describe trade relations on the West African slave coast. This is the subject of a series of remarkable essays by William Pietz: “Problem of the Fetish, I,” “Problem of the Fetish, II,” “Problem of the Fetish, IIIa.” See also his “Fetishism and Materialism.”

  8. Mauss, “Category of the Human Mind.” See also Charles Taylor's essay, “The Person.” The literature on modernity is too extensive to cite here, but I have relied on the classical philosophical texts, including C. Taylor, Sources of the Self and Secular Age; Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age; Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment; and Habermas, Philosophical Discourse. For a historical exploration of the making of the self in a specifically eighteenth-century English context, see Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self.

  9. The key documents here, which I will be referring to throughout this chapter and the next, are Mendelssohn
, “On the Question: What is Enlightenment?” Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” Hume, Treatise on Human Nature; Hutcheson, Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas; Kames, Essays on the Principles; and A. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments.

  10. Kant, “Answer to the Question,” 55.

  11. Outram, Enlightenment, 3. See also her Panorama of the Enlightenment. As will become apparent, the debates surrounding the project of Enlightenment do not occupy the center of my project, which will focus on the British tradition of taste, but the larger philosophical debates are pertinent. For these, see the essays collected in Schmidt, What is Enlightenment? See also Habermas, “Modernity,” 3–15. For the Enlightenment outside the North European circuit, see Venturi, Italy and the Enlightenment; Hulme and Jordanova, Enlightenment and Its Shadows; and Eze, Race and the Enlightenment. For slavery and the Enlightenment, see Duchet, Anthropologie et historie; and Cohen, French Encounter with Africans.

  12. Kant, “Answer to the Question,” 55.

  13. Kant, Observations on the Feeling, 110–11. The question of racism in Kant is outside the scope of my discussion, but it has generated significant debate in revisionary histories of the Enlightenment. Thomas Hill and Bernard Boxill focus on Kant's concern for universal freedom and consider racism tangential to his project; see their “Kant and Race.” For a contrary view, see Eze, “Color of Reason”; and Bernasconi, “Who Invented the Concept of Race?” See also Neugerbauer, “Racism of Hegel and Kant”; and Judy, “Kant and the Negro.”

  14. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 3.

  15. Cited in Eze, Race and the Enlightenment, 91.

  16. Quoted in Kramnick, Portable Enlightenment Reader, 669.

  17. Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, xv.

  18. Reiss, introduction to Kant: Political Writings, 18.

  19. A. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 216–17. My discussion here is indebted to Howard Caygill, Art of Judgement, 38–97.

  20. Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 9.

  21. Here, I provide a synopsis of a debate that has generated a lot of literature. In addition to Cassirer, see Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic; Bernstein, Fate of Art; Osborne, From an Aesthetic Point of View; Hammermeister, German Aesthetic Tradition; Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste; and Woodmansee, Author, Art, and the Market.

  22. Hulme and Jordanova, introduction to Enlightenment and Its Shadows, 7.

  23. Outram, Panorama of the Enlightenment, 142–46.

  24. Decorse, Archeology of Elmina, 25. See also Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825.

  25. Blakely, Blacks, 104–5.

  26. Ibid., 105.

  27. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 66. For a discussion of the black Atlantic as a counterculture of modernity, see Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 1–40.

  28. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts, 164. For a philosophical/historical exploration of the system of art, see Preben Mortensen in Art in the Social Order, 1–12, and the essays collected in Mattick, Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics.

  29. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, 164.

  30. Ibid., 225. For Kristeller, a key element in the transformation of the arts was the emergence of the amateur as a critic: “The origin of modern aesthetics in amateur criticism would go a long way to explain why works of art have until recently been analyzed by aestheticians from the point of view of the spectator, reader and listener rather than of the producing artist” (225).

  31. Addison and Steele, Spectator 1:31.

  32. Danto, Philosophical Disenfranchisement, 166.

  33. Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 278.

  34. Ibid., 339.

  35. In addition to Cassirer, the question of criticism in the Enlightenment has been discussed by Anthony Cascardi in Consequences of Enlightenment, 49–91.

  36. When I commenced work on this book, the major division in the field of aesthetic criticisms was between those who insisted on the redemptive work of art—its capacity to make truth claims—and those who dismissed its function as an alternative mode of knowledge. For the cognitive claims of art and aesthetic alienation, see Bernstein, Fate of Art, 1–16; and Osborne, introduction to From an Aesthetic Point of View, 1–12. Terry Eagleton dismisses the political project of the aesthetics as part of the middle-class search for political hegemony; see Ideology of the Aesthetic, 3. See also T. Bennett, Outside Literature; and Beech and Roberts, “Spectres of the Aesthetic.”

  37. Jay, “‘Aesthetic Ideology’ as Ideology,” 46.

  38. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 19.

  39. Menke, “Modernity, Subjectivity,” 46.

  40. For a discussion of Sterne's rhetoric and ethics of sensibility in relation to slavery, see Wood, Slavery, Empathy and Pornography, 12–18.

  41. Sancho, Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, 31. See also Sancho, New Light on the Life of Ignatius Sancho.

  42. In addition to his letters, Sancho's investment in the culture of taste can be detected in his musical compositions. See J. Wright, Ignatius Sancho and the essays collected in King, et al., Ignatius Sancho. For a study of the role of black writing during the period, see Sandiford, Measuring the Moment and Genius in Bondage; Ellis, “Ignatius Sancho's Letters”; and Ogude, Genius in Bondage.

  43. Adorno, Prisms, 34.

  44. Ashton, Negative Dialectics.

  45. Caygill, Art of Judgement, 98.

  46. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 38.

  47. E. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 160–61.

  48. A. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 211.

  49. Brewer, “‘Most Polite Age’,” 349.

  50. For the histories and discourses of taste and modern subjectivity in Britain, I have relied on the following: Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility; De Bolla, Discourse of the Sublime; De Bolla et al., Land, Nation and Culture; Ashfield and de Bolla, Sublime Reader; Bermingham and Brewer, ed., Consumption of Culture; Langford, Polite and Commercial People; McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society; Paulson, Breaking and Remaking; Sekora, Luxury; and Todd, Sensibility.

  51. Bermingham, introduction to Consumption of Culture, 4.

  52. McKendrick, “Consumer Revolution” in Birth of a Consumer Society, 2.

  53. Ibid., 9.

  54. A detailed exploration of this process can be found in Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination; Mortensen, Art in the Social, especially part 2; McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society; Sekora, Luxury; and Solkin, Painting for Money.

  55. Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty.

  56. R. Jones, Gender and the Formation of Taste, 11.

  57. In addition to Jones's Gender and the Formation of Taste, De Bolla, Discourse of the Sublime, and Mortensen, Art in the Social Order, excellent discussions of the politics and the discourse of politeness can be found in Barrell, Political Theory of Painting; Klein, “Third Earl of Shaftesbury,” Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness and “Politeness for Plebes”; and Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History.

  58. For the way these debates played out in Scotland, see the essays collected in Hont and Ignatieff, Wealth and Virtue; and Dwyer and Sher, Sociability and Society. For the English provinces, see Wilson, Sense of the People.

  59. For debates on civility and taste before this period, see Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility.

  60. A famous example of the mercantile code as the mediator of social relationships can be found at the beginning of Sterne's Sentimental Journey where Yorick slips a crown to the French chambermaid, a reward that, observes Robert Markley, “puts a price on her virtue.” See Markley, “Sentimentality as Performance.”

  61. Mortensen, Art in the Social Order, 95; and McKendrick, “Consumer Revolution,” 14.

  62. See Berry, Idea of Luxury, 241; and Castronovo, English Gentleman.

  63. McKendrick, “Consumer Revolution,” 10.

  64. Steele, Spectator 6 (March 7, 1711), in Addison and Steele, Spectator1:26.r />
  65. Quoted in Mortensen, Art in the Social Order, 80.

  66. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, 66.

  67. Mortensen, Art in the Social Order, 83. For the August desire for order, see Humphreys, “Arts in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” 5–7. See also Lipking, Ordering of the Arts.

  68. Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, 218. See also Mortensen, Art in the Social Order, 107–17; and Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness.

  69. Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 231.

  70. Ibid., 231–332.

  71. S. Johnson, Rambler, no. 92 (February 2, 1751), in The Rambler 2:128.

  72. E. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 12.

  73. Ibid., 1.

  74. E. Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace, 126.

  75. Porter, “Enlightenment in England,” 11.

  76. Lamont and Fournier, Cultivating Differences, 9.

  77. This point is made powerfully by Bermingham in her introduction to Consumption of Culture, 5. I will return to the notion of disavowal later in this chapter, but I am using it strictly in the Freudian sense, not as a reference to negation, but to the subjects' refusal to embrace the consequences, social or psychic, of experiences that they clearly perceived. See Laplanche and Pontalis, Language of Psycho-Analysis, 118–21.

  78. Ibid., 353.

  79. McKendrick, in Birth of a Consumer Society, 108.

  80. Daniels, Fields of Vision, 48. See also McKendrick, “Josiah Wedgwood,” in McKendrick et al., Birth of a Consumer Society, 100–45.

  81. For a discussion of Wright and the spectacle of power and the industrial revolution, see Daniels, Field of Vision, 43–79.

  82. See McKendrick, “Josiah Wedgwood.”

  83. Quoted in Honour, Image of the Black, 62.

  84. Ibid., 62–63.

  85. Quoted in Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, xv.

  86. Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 5.

  87. A. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 214.